"There may be some form of breakthrough and enormous amounts of knowledge about how we think may occur quickly, and this must be what he is banking on. As it is, we don't really even know how perception works, and how we can predict the future well enough to catch a ball when our senses are all a bit of time behind reality (our brains have lag - but we get around that very, very well)."
actually, we know quite a bit, but can't repeat it easily. sometimes is as simple as creating something has high quality as the human eye, which we understand quite well.
as for predictions of the path of a ball, that is a simple model of dynamics.
sometimes it breaks, like when you lift something that is lighter than you expect, or are looking through water or something.
i completely agree that we don't know everything, and need to learn a lot, but i don't think we know only a trivial ammount currently.
Machine Dreams:: Ray Kurzweil spoke at RI25. Well, when I say "at", I mean that he was projected onto a transparent screen, in what was perhaps the highest quality tele-presence I've seen.
But still, he lacked situational awareness, and it was awkward at times. I wanted to ask questions, but there wasn't an option.
The interview linked above is a lot like his talk. He talked about the numerous exponential growths in recent technology, and not just Moore's Law.
He figures that he should try to be healthy until 2020, then a biomedical revolution will keep him healthy for another 20 years, and then a nano-technology revolution will kick in to keep him alive forever.
By "alive", he means that his intelligence propagates in the cold, soul-less heart of a machine. But considering that I agree with him that there is no ghost in the shell, this soulless form doesn't seem that bad. At least you're still sentient!
I agree with the principle, that there is nothing to stop this, that all technology is pushing us in this direction, and that it would prove to be a very positive experience. I do not necessarily agree about the time frame. I can't really trust the curves that he fits with so much confidence. Then again, I'm 32 years younger than him, so if he is off by 32 years, I guess I shouldn't complain:)
Last night at a party, drunk enough to make the discussion interesting, some folks objected to the extrapolation of the increasing rate of expansion of scientific knowledge. What guarantee is there, after all, to find all the secrets in that time? I would say first that the rate of growth in the number of researchers alone could do it. Also, increases in productivity, have always been accompanied with "this pace can't continue" claims, which have always been wrong.
Also brought up was the notion that life is defined by death. That is a very defeatist thought, which I will fight, err, to my grave. In addition, some thought they would get bored if they lived forever. I would say that I could never complain about there being "more books than i could ever read", which is a great thing. Also, I've always wanted to get really good at GO.
Finally, the notion of replication of machine intelligence was introduced. Someone claimed that I shouldn't discount the important sociological and physical implications of being born from a human whom. I agreed, only to realize that the first few moments of any existence will have a huge implication on the formation of the individual intelligence. So if I copy myself, I'll have to think of a few appropriate words to introduce the other me into this world. So far, all I can come up with is "hi".
The basic difference to those that have forgotten: you are going to die.
Unless you have faith that something, anything, will happen after that, your goal should be to live forever while maintaining a certain level of stimulation
the same people that won't be able to control the future a 1 year from now going quickly will not be able to control.
I wouldn't try to control just a dynamic system, simply react to its needs. For starters: take a sample of every animal you care about (and no, I don't care about a millions species of bacteria), then go at it.
Furthermore, your entire attitude is one of control of the future. That is a myth that you need to recover from.
Read this book, "The Future and Its Enemies" to realize what kinds of barriers you're putting up in planning the 'one, best way'.
Again, my only interest here is to lift any bans. Let the millions closer to the information decide how to deal with this threat, not the dozens of pandering politicians.
" Do you really think that new crop plants created by GM companies will be freely given away after spending decades and billions of dollars on research and development"
Given or stolen, yes. I wouldn't be surprised if the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation spends $100M doing it. They do that just about yearly, and there are many more of people like them.
"Or do you think they'd be better off doing subsistence farming where they can actually grow the food that they can eat and afford to eat?"
That's just like the attitude towards American companies hiring in poor countries. The alternative to sweat shops is not great IT jobs; it's living in a trash heap, earning 1/2 the wage.
The alternative to this isn't simply subsistence farming, it is the status quo of hundreds of millions of people who can't even make it as a subsistence farmer.
"American attitude to think that we can develop a "silver bullet" to solve a problem."
I do suppose the rate of the rest of the world's major feat accomplishment is drastically slower, and I can understand the different attitude. The aforementioned attitudes towards freedom and enterprise lend to this as well.
If you're in the EU nations, I would give a far stronger warning against the coming dictatorship by 50K unelected bureaucrats than anything that could possibly happen in the same time frame by GMO.
not all research is for corporations. there are many people interested in helping starving folks. After all, around 30T over 50 yeasr has been spent on aid to Africa.
also, like generic rip-offs for drugs, there would be rip-offs of other pentented goods.
the point here is that there is little need for a ban. it only hurts.
on a side note, debt is not the reason the 3rd world is poor. A lack of ownership of governmentment, leads to currupt public sectors, which is untenable with private property, wealth creation, and stable economic growth.
our meat in America is not produced at the expense of the world's poor. In fact, the only way I could imagine this is if we were to buy their grain to make our livestock, they would certainly be better off. It isn't an expense to sell goods!
as I mentioned elsewhere, production locally is impotent, and could be strengthened by more robust crops which are not as sensitive to their environments. Allowing this tech to be ingrained (no pun intended) in the crop, would allow any amateur to become a farmer.
The next step would be to eliminate agricultural subsidies, and purchase our food from the free world market, which is probably the fastest way to eliminate poverty in the world.
like the 4B people who have never touched a computer
from another reply: "plants that are not suseptible to drought, flood, disease, insects, or salty water can be made with GMO, like a project out of India to grow rice in salt water.
foods that would normally be only a small part of a diet can be made to be complete, like golden rice.
because of the threat of bans, companies don't invest as much as they would."
that is simply not true, in the numbers you would like to suggest.
"produce slower changes"
rate of change is irrelevant if no threats have yet been found with direct GMO.
the point about starvation isn't one about crop yields.
The point is that empowered plants are more liekly to be successfully grown by an uneducated, amatuer farmer. If you could give the starving world a crop that would grow just by putting it in the ground, that would directly save lives.
Either way, I agree to a certain extent that agricultural sudsidies in western nations are a problem, if only because they make competition by poorer countries more difficult.
But keep in mind that European countries give 100X more subsidies to their farmers than US companies.
plants that are not suseptible to drought, flood, disease, insects, or salty water can be made with GMO, like a project out of India to grow rice in salt water.
foods that would normally be only a small part of a diet can be made to be complete, like golden rice.
because of the threat of bans, companies don't invest as much as they would.
the main point is that there is 0 evidence for something wrong in these foods, but many counties have banned them anyway.
In Germany you have an impotent man in power who will lose because too many people are feeding from the trough, and too few people are paying for it. No one there wants to pay for, or give up, on the welfare state. Democracy in action!
Meanwhile, the extreme right and left made unprecedented strides in the most recent elections.
Across Europe, a largely non-representative, supra-national government is taking power, while in each of the member nations, the EU is becoming more and more unpopular.
The only reason Florida in 2000 was worse than the dead voting in Illinois in 1960, was because you had one side, Gore's side, marching in with lawyers who planned to "recount until the right candidate wins". In 1960, Nixon didn't make that choice because he thought it would be better for the nation.
Europe has a thing or two to learn about democracy, and so does America.
I give not a shit about what technocratic observers think about our elections. Do you give a shit about what technocrats in the UN think about Darfur, i.e. the reason no action is being taken? I care only enough to repudiate their ideas of multilateral non-action in the face of genocide.
What more people need to recognize is the problem of mob-rule, welfare-state democracy, and the threat of tyranny in an unlimited government, even if the majority vote for it.
if you haven't seen my blog, check it out here.
below is my post there on this matter:
Slashdot links this article on cyborg rats used in search and rescue. I've been told that one big problem is giving a guarantee that the rats don't begin eating the people (dead or alive) they find. I suppose that the stimulation of pleasure centers of the brain would dominate other such carnal urges.
Each rat has electrodes implanted in three areas of the brain which process odour signals, plan movements and experience rewards.
The scientists stimulated the reward centre to generate feelings of pleasure when the rodent's nose picked up a whiff of human. In this way, the rats were trained to seek out human odours.
All of this is desirable for a few reasons. The computer-rat brain interface research is also very applicable to computer-human brain interface. I just went to this very interesting talk on the subject. Further, very dexterous robots with high level perception are few and far between. A rat is amazingly mobile and also has an excellent perception suite. Of course, along the way, projects like this could save lives, and that is always wonderful.
Flexible sensors make robot skin. This could have a number of applications. The first two I imagine are a richer interface between machines and humans and advanced manipulation.
If cheap enough, the machine can understand the precise location and posture of a human. Mentioned in the article are car seats. Imagine a bed which adjusted itself to minimize pressure points.
I should mention a project out of CMU by Chris Atkeson and Daniel Wilson, where he put only a few cheap accelerometers in the floorboard of a house. The algorithm processing these sensors could localize humans in the rooms with remarkable accuracy. The challenge then becomes sensor fusion and system integration, in using this information to boost performance of the entire system. For instance, a human tracker using vision alone would be dwarfed by such a system which had a reasonable seed guess from pressure sensors.
The second application is for rich manipulation. A robot grasping a glass must do so with enough pressure to not drop it, but also enough sensitivity to not break it. I doubt humans use significant higher reasoning in this process, unlike the advantage humans have over computer vision programs. Rather, robots could sense the weight fairly easily, but also the type of surface, and learn how brittle such a surface is.
"This technology is old, incredibly old in the scheme of computer science and electrical engineering. Rodney Brooks, MIT, Rodney Brooks! Okay, I'm okay. It was on the cover of Popular Science, for crying out loud."
well, so was computer chess, but we see news in AI about it. The point is that Robotics is a field, and reactive robots, subsumption architecture, and such are sub-fields. Hearing news about the latest instance is perfectly legitimate.
"Could it be possible that a computational approach isn't necessarily the way to go?"
As Brooks showed, you can get very complicated behavior from reactive or even semi-stateful robots. BUT, I would question the scalability to something more application specific and useful.
For instance, imagine such a bot making a sandwich, and then cleaning your toilette...
Also, as some point, you're going to want to give the bot an order, like go from A to B to C then back. Rhex would be unable to do that currently without a very engineered environment, which goes against the entire point of such a bot which moves skillfully in all environments.
Adding a robust perception loop around the sense-response robot is the way to go, as far as I'm concerned.
While the ability of the bot to go over hard terrain is amazing, the point is that your relinquish direct control.
The basic problem in perception is dealing with the drastic motions.
The computer vision methods needed are quite complicated, requiring complimenting sensors like inertial measurement devices. Also extremely wide-angle cameras are excellent because things stay in view, but difficult because the pin-hole model fails.
Go here for some work that is now a bit dated, from a 180degree camera strapped to rhex: http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/projects/buzzard/ rhex/
Actually, most native Americans had very poorly structured property rights and common law, relative to westerners.
If they had better weapons, and a method for immigrants to purchase land, I'm sure that's how colonization would have taken place.
The natives weren't exactly the only victims of expansionary policies, from Caesar to Charlemagne to Napoleon; people have been invaded in the western world for quite some time.
Also, private property must come hand in hand with a law structure that should defend the rights. It's like the old saying: "there wouldn't be a first amendment without the second".
So a note to all those interested in colonizing space with robots: make sure you have a few killer robots in addition to terraforming ones...
If you want private space ventures, you need private property rights in space.
Otherwise, there is little incentive to do commercial ventures. Since the discovery of the new world, private property has been a key to getting people interested in coming.
I would suggest that a human or robotic presence would be enough to claim a certain surface area of land on a planet or asteroid, if it had not yet been claimed.
This way, there will be few disputes, as a first landing will be obvious, and the incentives to expedite exploration are clear.
What people fail to realize also is that having private property also means that it can be changed hands in a market. It wasn't like when America was owned by a few folks and everyone else in the world said "drat, now no one else will ever be able to own land!"
Slashdot Mirror
"There may be some form of breakthrough and enormous amounts of knowledge about how we think may occur quickly, and this must be what he is banking on. As it is, we don't really even know how perception works, and how we can predict the future well enough to catch a ball when our senses are all a bit of time behind reality (our brains have lag - but we get around that very, very well)."
actually, we know quite a bit, but can't repeat it easily. sometimes is as simple as creating something has high quality as the human eye, which we understand quite well.
as for predictions of the path of a ball, that is a simple model of dynamics.
sometimes it breaks, like when you lift something that is lighter than you expect, or are looking through water or something.
i completely agree that we don't know everything, and need to learn a lot, but i don't think we know only a trivial ammount currently.
i agree.
especially about the "semiconscious" issue.
that's why i added "while maintaining a certain level of stimulation".
either way, i'm looking forward to when this is s pressing debate, and not just speculation.
Machine Dreams:: Ray Kurzweil spoke at RI25. Well, when I say "at", I mean that he was projected onto a transparent screen, in what was perhaps the highest quality tele-presence I've seen.
:)
But still, he lacked situational awareness, and it was awkward at times. I wanted to ask questions, but there wasn't an option.
The interview linked above is a lot like his talk. He talked about the numerous exponential growths in recent technology, and not just Moore's Law.
He figures that he should try to be healthy until 2020, then a biomedical revolution will keep him healthy for another 20 years, and then a nano-technology revolution will kick in to keep him alive forever.
By "alive", he means that his intelligence propagates in the cold, soul-less heart of a machine. But considering that I agree with him that there is no ghost in the shell, this soulless form doesn't seem that bad. At least you're still sentient!
I agree with the principle, that there is nothing to stop this, that all technology is pushing us in this direction, and that it would prove to be a very positive experience. I do not necessarily agree about the time frame. I can't really trust the curves that he fits with so much confidence. Then again, I'm 32 years younger than him, so if he is off by 32 years, I guess I shouldn't complain
Last night at a party, drunk enough to make the discussion interesting, some folks objected to the extrapolation of the increasing rate of expansion of scientific knowledge. What guarantee is there, after all, to find all the secrets in that time? I would say first that the rate of growth in the number of researchers alone could do it. Also, increases in productivity, have always been accompanied with "this pace can't continue" claims, which have always been wrong.
Also brought up was the notion that life is defined by death. That is a very defeatist thought, which I will fight, err, to my grave. In addition, some thought they would get bored if they lived forever. I would say that I could never complain about there being "more books than i could ever read", which is a great thing. Also, I've always wanted to get really good at GO.
Finally, the notion of replication of machine intelligence was introduced. Someone claimed that I shouldn't discount the important sociological and physical implications of being born from a human whom. I agreed, only to realize that the first few moments of any existence will have a huge implication on the formation of the individual intelligence. So if I copy myself, I'll have to think of a few appropriate words to introduce the other me into this world. So far, all I can come up with is "hi".
"What's wrong with existing as a human?"
The basic difference to those that have forgotten: you are going to die.
Unless you have faith that something, anything, will happen after that, your goal should be to live forever while maintaining a certain level of stimulation
the same people that won't be able to control the future a 1 year from now going quickly will not be able to control.
I wouldn't try to control just a dynamic system, simply react to its needs. For starters: take a sample of every animal you care about (and no, I don't care about a millions species of bacteria), then go at it.
Furthermore, your entire attitude is one of control of the future. That is a myth that you need to recover from.
Read this book, "The Future and Its Enemies" to realize what kinds of barriers you're putting up in planning the 'one, best way'.
Again, my only interest here is to lift any bans. Let the millions closer to the information decide how to deal with this threat, not the dozens of pandering politicians.
" Do you really think that new crop plants created by GM companies will be freely given away after spending decades and billions of dollars on research and development"
Given or stolen, yes. I wouldn't be surprised if the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation spends $100M doing it. They do that just about yearly, and there are many more of people like them.
"Or do you think they'd be better off doing subsistence farming where they can actually grow the food that they can eat and afford to eat?"
That's just like the attitude towards American companies hiring in poor countries. The alternative to sweat shops is not great IT jobs; it's living in a trash heap, earning 1/2 the wage.
The alternative to this isn't simply subsistence farming, it is the status quo of hundreds of millions of people who can't even make it as a subsistence farmer.
"American attitude to think that we can develop a "silver bullet" to solve a problem." I do suppose the rate of the rest of the world's major feat accomplishment is drastically slower, and I can understand the different attitude. The aforementioned attitudes towards freedom and enterprise lend to this as well. If you're in the EU nations, I would give a far stronger warning against the coming dictatorship by 50K unelected bureaucrats than anything that could possibly happen in the same time frame by GMO.
not all research is for corporations. there are many people interested in helping starving folks. After all, around 30T over 50 yeasr has been spent on aid to Africa.
also, like generic rip-offs for drugs, there would be rip-offs of other pentented goods.
the point here is that there is little need for a ban. it only hurts.
on a side note, debt is not the reason the 3rd world is poor. A lack of ownership of governmentment, leads to currupt public sectors, which is untenable with private property, wealth creation, and stable economic growth.
OK, maybe that is a good thing.
:)
wow. did someone just accept someone else's argument on slashdot as potentially valid?
that hasto be a first! thanks
you can read more here
this is just part of a BIG event for CMU, the Robotics Institute's 25th.
Look here for semi-live blogging of tomorrows talks.
our meat in America is not produced at the expense of the world's poor. In fact, the only way I could imagine this is if we were to buy their grain to make our livestock, they would certainly be better off. It isn't an expense to sell goods!
as I mentioned elsewhere, production locally is impotent, and could be strengthened by more robust crops which are not as sensitive to their environments. Allowing this tech to be ingrained (no pun intended) in the crop, would allow any amateur to become a farmer.
The next step would be to eliminate agricultural subsidies, and purchase our food from the free world market, which is probably the fastest way to eliminate poverty in the world.
like the 4B people who have never touched a computer
from another reply:
"plants that are not suseptible to drought, flood, disease, insects, or salty water can be made with GMO, like a project out of India to grow rice in salt water.
foods that would normally be only a small part of a diet can be made to be complete, like golden rice.
because of the threat of bans, companies don't invest as much as they would."
"Yet, there are Americans starving."
that is simply not true, in the numbers you would like to suggest.
"produce slower changes"
rate of change is irrelevant if no threats have yet been found with direct GMO.
the point about starvation isn't one about crop yields.
The point is that empowered plants are more liekly to be successfully grown by an uneducated, amatuer farmer. If you could give the starving world a crop that would grow just by putting it in the ground, that would directly save lives.
Either way, I agree to a certain extent that agricultural sudsidies in western nations are a problem, if only because they make competition by poorer countries more difficult.
But keep in mind that European countries give 100X more subsidies to their farmers than US companies.
plants that are not suseptible to drought, flood, disease, insects, or salty water can be made with GMO, like a project out of India to grow rice in salt water.
foods that would normally be only a small part of a diet can be made to be complete, like golden rice.
because of the threat of bans, companies don't invest as much as they would.
the main point is that there is 0 evidence for something wrong in these foods, but many counties have banned them anyway.
"problems with having GM foods on the dinner table"
problems indeed...
All overreactions.
All unproven.
All irrelevant given the older style GM organisms such common corn, wheat, grapefruit, etc.
Basically, thousands of people starve because of technocrats & self-righteous bureaucrats.
scandalous...
In Germany you have an impotent man in power who will lose because too many people are feeding from the trough, and too few people are paying for it. No one there wants to pay for, or give up, on the welfare state. Democracy in action!
Meanwhile, the extreme right and left made unprecedented strides in the most recent elections.
Across Europe, a largely non-representative, supra-national government is taking power, while in each of the member nations, the EU is becoming more and more unpopular.
The only reason Florida in 2000 was worse than the dead voting in Illinois in 1960, was because you had one side, Gore's side, marching in with lawyers who planned to "recount until the right candidate wins". In 1960, Nixon didn't make that choice because he thought it would be better for the nation.
Europe has a thing or two to learn about democracy, and so does America.
I give not a shit about what technocratic observers think about our elections. Do you give a shit about what technocrats in the UN think about Darfur, i.e. the reason no action is being taken? I care only enough to repudiate their ideas of multilateral non-action in the face of genocide.
What more people need to recognize is the problem of mob-rule, welfare-state democracy, and the threat of tyranny in an unlimited government, even if the majority vote for it.
Slashdot links this article on cyborg rats used in search and rescue. I've been told that one big problem is giving a guarantee that the rats don't begin eating the people (dead or alive) they find. I suppose that the stimulation of pleasure centers of the brain would dominate other such carnal urges. All of this is desirable for a few reasons. The computer-rat brain interface research is also very applicable to computer-human brain interface. I just went to this very interesting talk on the subject. Further, very dexterous robots with high level perception are few and far between. A rat is amazingly mobile and also has an excellent perception suite. Of course, along the way, projects like this could save lives, and that is always wonderful.
check out my blog, where i post comments interesting stuff related to robotics...
My post on this topic is here and below.
Flexible sensors make robot skin. This could have a number of applications. The first two I imagine are a richer interface between machines and humans and advanced manipulation.
If cheap enough, the machine can understand the precise location and posture of a human. Mentioned in the article are car seats. Imagine a bed which adjusted itself to minimize pressure points.
I should mention a project out of CMU by Chris Atkeson and Daniel Wilson, where he put only a few cheap accelerometers in the floorboard of a house. The algorithm processing these sensors could localize humans in the rooms with remarkable accuracy. The challenge then becomes sensor fusion and system integration, in using this information to boost performance of the entire system. For instance, a human tracker using vision alone would be dwarfed by such a system which had a reasonable seed guess from pressure sensors.
The second application is for rich manipulation. A robot grasping a glass must do so with enough pressure to not drop it, but also enough sensitivity to not break it. I doubt humans use significant higher reasoning in this process, unlike the advantage humans have over computer vision programs. Rather, robots could sense the weight fairly easily, but also the type of surface, and learn how brittle such a surface is.
actually roaches are probably cleaner than you...
most poisons work because they touch them, and then clearn their feet constantly...
that said, they do carry disease
no shit...
:)
i think exposing short links for transparency works better in short posts. Considering the domain is exposed anyway...
on my blog, the hundreds of links are all brightly colored words for yah
"This technology is old, incredibly old in the scheme of computer science and electrical engineering. Rodney Brooks, MIT, Rodney Brooks! Okay, I'm okay. It was on the cover of Popular Science, for crying out loud."
well, so was computer chess, but we see news in AI about it.
The point is that Robotics is a field, and reactive robots, subsumption architecture, and such are sub-fields.
Hearing news about the latest instance is perfectly legitimate.
"Could it be possible that a computational approach isn't necessarily the way to go?"
As Brooks showed, you can get very complicated behavior from reactive or even semi-stateful robots. BUT, I would question the scalability to something more application specific and useful.
For instance, imagine such a bot making a sandwich, and then cleaning your toilette...
Also, as some point, you're going to want to give the bot an order, like go from A to B to C then back. Rhex would be unable to do that currently without a very engineered environment, which goes against the entire point of such a bot which moves skillfully in all environments.
Adding a robust perception loop around the sense-response robot is the way to go, as far as I'm concerned.
also, you can get more info here:
http://www.rhex.net/
look for the great video of the tumble from a pile of boulders, which doesn't seem to be a problem.
I wish I could see ASIMO take a fall like that...and watch the subsequent execution of the grad student who let it happen.
on the perception side...
/ rhex/
While the ability of the bot to go over hard terrain is amazing, the point is that your relinquish direct control.
The basic problem in perception is dealing with the drastic motions.
The computer vision methods needed are quite complicated, requiring complimenting sensors like inertial measurement devices. Also extremely wide-angle cameras are excellent because things stay in view, but difficult because the pin-hole model fails.
Go here for some work that is now a bit dated, from a 180degree camera strapped to rhex:
http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/projects/buzzard
375 million acres of cropland in america http://www.numbersusa.com/interests/farmland.html
raise your hand if you think 10M acres is small...
Actually, most native Americans had very poorly structured property rights and common law, relative to westerners.
If they had better weapons, and a method for immigrants to purchase land, I'm sure that's how colonization would have taken place.
The natives weren't exactly the only victims of expansionary policies, from Caesar to Charlemagne to Napoleon; people have been invaded in the western world for quite some time.
Also, private property must come hand in hand with a law structure that should defend the rights. It's like the old saying: "there wouldn't be a first amendment without the second".
So a note to all those interested in colonizing space with robots: make sure you have a few killer robots in addition to terraforming ones...
If you want private space ventures, you need private property rights in space. Otherwise, there is little incentive to do commercial ventures. Since the discovery of the new world, private property has been a key to getting people interested in coming. I would suggest that a human or robotic presence would be enough to claim a certain surface area of land on a planet or asteroid, if it had not yet been claimed. This way, there will be few disputes, as a first landing will be obvious, and the incentives to expedite exploration are clear. What people fail to realize also is that having private property also means that it can be changed hands in a market. It wasn't like when America was owned by a few folks and everyone else in the world said "drat, now no one else will ever be able to own land!"