"Most kids might use it for piracy. That's why he said "some deserverving" kid, that you (presumably) know would be interested in developing homebrew games, or having a computer of their own."
I highly doubt that is what he had in mind considering he suggested he'd give the kid a stack of blanks and contribute to their delinquency.
I hope the rest of that is a tasteless joke. You've managed to villainized geeks protesting the broken and horrible copyright system and to support the bogus mentality that sex is harmful and therefore would be harmful to children. Not to mention suggesting it would be acceptable to take a perfectly good young geek and try to convert them to nerddom.
I know you were just trying to be polite but come on, he's totally a pedo.
Lets consider the information at hand. He is concerned about a digital recorder costing $10 more but he is practically tripping over himself in his rush to run out and get a PS3 he doesn't even want. It's obvious, in his mind the recorder is just money down the drain where the PS3 converts directly to boy tail. Just picture the old man on family guy offering a little boy a video game. Nuff said.
"The fact that IBM did not do this indicates that they have something to hide"
Or that they didn't have the processing power to run both applications simultaneously. There ARE brilliant voice recognition systems (I disagree with OCR I've never seen it done well) but they tend to be running on massive neural nets with a small selection of possible responses. Less intensive applications tend to be crap even after hours of training in some cases. I don't know about you but I don't think it is even a given an artificial intelligence should communicate or receive input via OCR and voice recognition. It seems far more efficient to communicate via text in the first place.
I don't doubt IBM has potential profitable applications in mind for something that parses language this well (homeland security?). Jeopardy wasn't an interesting challenge from the viewpoint of auditory or optical recognition. Actually there is plenty of AI out there that does reasonably well in these areas already. Jeopardy was a challenge because of the understanding of language and concept relations required to be able to correctly answer the questions.
P.S. With regard to computing power of the brain. Just because the raw potential is there doesn't mean that much potential is required to simulate the function. The human brain isn't a designed process and it is highly unlikely to operate efficiently. There are artifacts aplenty and redundancy galore.
"Not only do we not know this, there is a good bit of evidence to the contrary. The human brain is not anything like the computers we build today, except to say that they can both "compute", to varying degrees."
There COULD be something magical about the human brain. But we have modeled the brains of animals with fewer neurons successfully and they are made of pretty much the same stuff just in lower quantities.
But it doesn't illustrate the GP's point. It doesn't illustrate a particular lack of understanding or intelligence and certainly isn't support for the post he responded to that there is no real AI at work.
Making a technical mistake that is often made by the human contestants indicates sophisticated intelligence. Just like an IQ test, often giving the same wrong answer that other highly intelligent individuals gave will result in a better score than actually giving the correct answer.
I hath sinned. I read the article. *hangs head in shame* The paper counterparts are far less sensitive. Silicon sensors give about 80 micronewtons while the paper give 120 un.
".it isn't like our country DOES things based on a religion. No one has gone to war over here holding the bible up saying"
You seem to be confusing the reasons people SAY they are doing something with the actual reasons. If a right wing fundamentalist president (e.g. Bush) declares a war on 'terror' in response to a Muslim extremist attack (e.g. 9/11) and then starts declaring war on Muslim nations that aren't even involved in said attack (e.g. Iraq); it is pretty hard to make a case for something other than religion being the real motivation for that attack whether he holds a bible up or not.
Tell it to the Muslims murdered by the Christian US warlords after 9/11. There are no innocents in the religion game, just a bunch of idiots using their psychotic belief in invisible and improbable deities to justify murder and the inability to compromise.
That is the problem with a god. There can be no negotiation, whatever you think the god has ordered must go. It doesn't matter how many suffer or how terrible the consequences. After all, those suffering are all the property of god and their suffering is part of his plan.
The bacteria that is also developed and can turn sunlight and a tank of sugar water into the fuel of your choice for less than the current subsidized price of oil? It already exists, the company is just scaling up commercial production.
"The only denial I see is in the people who think technology will not produce reasonable alternatives to oil for large-scale production of energy when oil gets expensive enough."
Yes. We shouldn't develop and advance reasonable alternatives because we will eventually develop and advance reasonable alternatives. Flawless logic here. These things will appear via a free market magic carpet.
"People will naturally stop digging for oil at some point when it makes sense, which it simply does not today."
We can produce carbon neutral gasoline with bacteria, sugar water, and sunlight today for a price equivalent to $33/barrel which is far less than oil. Your right. Obviously there is still DEMAND for oil thanks to stupid people and as long as that is the case it doesn't make sense to stop destroying the world to harvest it. I'm with you. Let me just buy some oil stocks...
yeah but does anyone use oil to heat their house? I heard of oil and coal stoves being used back in the day but its all electric and natural gas these days. Even coal would be more sensible since there are shit tons of it here in the states.
Solar and wind work just fine at the plant level. But there are bacteria that produce gasoline, diesel, and kerosene directly from sunlight and nutrient water and the process costs less than the current subsidized price of oil. So why do we give a shit?
The problem with that is that for better or worse threads often have no relation to the parent comments. Sometimes the most interesting sub-threads are several levels deep.
This is easy to identify. Skepticism goes both ways. You have to be as skeptical of those who want to discount claims as you are of those making them. By assuming neither stance and acting as if the side which is backed by the most (in quantity and/or quality) evidence is correct you automatically keep a view that is open to change should the evidence scales tip the other way.
Just as science works toward an answer which makes correct predictions with greater consistency and accuracy you will be working toward views and methods of evaluating evidence that provide greater consistency over time.
"Established science has self-correcting methods such that even if some understanding was incredibly wrong, it eventually drifts into correctness."
True enough. But that doesn't make the understanding of established science at a given moment, on a given topic, correct.
Sound logic, combined with the scientific method, will give you the answer that has the highest probability of being correct at any moment. That won't stop you from being wrong, and on a daily basis. It just gives you the potential to lower your probability of being wrong next time.
You make a bigger assumption than that. You assume a chemical based lifeform that utilizes a system of intelligence similar to ours in the form of a brain.
Even on Earth we know of an intelligence that is substantially different than our brain. Birds have a brain which is substantially different in form and function from mammals. It is possible that there are creatures with intelligence we don't recognize because its form is drastically different from our own. Insects for instance could be far more intelligent than we credit. If you are looking for and expect to find simple behavior you are going to be looking for macro behavior patterns that can be explained with few primitives. Just because you find them doesn't mean there isn't more going on.
If we studied humans like we do ants we might find that our behavior can be simplified to a model of not much more complexity. Especially when you consider that we tend to favor behavior like our own and call it intelligence. For instance, tool usage.
Slashdot Mirror
"Most kids might use it for piracy. That's why he said "some deserverving" kid, that you (presumably) know would be interested in developing homebrew games, or having a computer of their own."
I highly doubt that is what he had in mind considering he suggested he'd give the kid a stack of blanks and contribute to their delinquency.
I hope the rest of that is a tasteless joke. You've managed to villainized geeks protesting the broken and horrible copyright system and to support the bogus mentality that sex is harmful and therefore would be harmful to children. Not to mention suggesting it would be acceptable to take a perfectly good young geek and try to convert them to nerddom.
Shame on you sir. Shame on you.
I know you were just trying to be polite but come on, he's totally a pedo.
Lets consider the information at hand. He is concerned about a digital recorder costing $10 more but he is practically tripping over himself in his rush to run out and get a PS3 he doesn't even want. It's obvious, in his mind the recorder is just money down the drain where the PS3 converts directly to boy tail. Just picture the old man on family guy offering a little boy a video game. Nuff said.
Humans don't make the mistakes to imitate so imitation wouldn't be 'for the same reason'.
This AI isn't making the mistakes in order to imitate either.
The electrical fields would just be another form of connection between neurons. That would still leave us with a squishy neural network.
It does it if makes them for the same reason.
"The fact that IBM did not do this indicates that they have something to hide"
Or that they didn't have the processing power to run both applications simultaneously. There ARE brilliant voice recognition systems (I disagree with OCR I've never seen it done well) but they tend to be running on massive neural nets with a small selection of possible responses. Less intensive applications tend to be crap even after hours of training in some cases. I don't know about you but I don't think it is even a given an artificial intelligence should communicate or receive input via OCR and voice recognition. It seems far more efficient to communicate via text in the first place.
I don't doubt IBM has potential profitable applications in mind for something that parses language this well (homeland security?). Jeopardy wasn't an interesting challenge from the viewpoint of auditory or optical recognition. Actually there is plenty of AI out there that does reasonably well in these areas already. Jeopardy was a challenge because of the understanding of language and concept relations required to be able to correctly answer the questions.
How is that different than us?
"I don't think Watson is true AI"
What would true AI be? Most games have true AI these days.
P.S. With regard to computing power of the brain. Just because the raw potential is there doesn't mean that much potential is required to simulate the function. The human brain isn't a designed process and it is highly unlikely to operate efficiently. There are artifacts aplenty and redundancy galore.
"Not only do we not know this, there is a good bit of evidence to the contrary. The human brain is not anything like the computers we build today, except to say that they can both "compute", to varying degrees."
There COULD be something magical about the human brain. But we have modeled the brains of animals with fewer neurons successfully and they are made of pretty much the same stuff just in lower quantities.
But it doesn't illustrate the GP's point. It doesn't illustrate a particular lack of understanding or intelligence and certainly isn't support for the post he responded to that there is no real AI at work.
Making a technical mistake that is often made by the human contestants indicates sophisticated intelligence. Just like an IQ test, often giving the same wrong answer that other highly intelligent individuals gave will result in a better score than actually giving the correct answer.
I hath sinned. I read the article. *hangs head in shame* The paper counterparts are far less sensitive. Silicon sensors give about 80 micronewtons while the paper give 120 un.
".it isn't like our country DOES things based on a religion. No one has gone to war over here holding the bible up saying"
You seem to be confusing the reasons people SAY they are doing something with the actual reasons. If a right wing fundamentalist president (e.g. Bush) declares a war on 'terror' in response to a Muslim extremist attack (e.g. 9/11) and then starts declaring war on Muslim nations that aren't even involved in said attack (e.g. Iraq); it is pretty hard to make a case for something other than religion being the real motivation for that attack whether he holds a bible up or not.
Tell it to the Muslims murdered by the Christian US warlords after 9/11. There are no innocents in the religion game, just a bunch of idiots using their psychotic belief in invisible and improbable deities to justify murder and the inability to compromise.
That is the problem with a god. There can be no negotiation, whatever you think the god has ordered must go. It doesn't matter how many suffer or how terrible the consequences. After all, those suffering are all the property of god and their suffering is part of his plan.
The bacteria that is also developed and can turn sunlight and a tank of sugar water into the fuel of your choice for less than the current subsidized price of oil? It already exists, the company is just scaling up commercial production.
"The only denial I see is in the people who think technology will not produce reasonable alternatives to oil for large-scale production of energy when oil gets expensive enough."
Yes. We shouldn't develop and advance reasonable alternatives because we will eventually develop and advance reasonable alternatives. Flawless logic here. These things will appear via a free market magic carpet.
"People will naturally stop digging for oil at some point when it makes sense, which it simply does not today."
We can produce carbon neutral gasoline with bacteria, sugar water, and sunlight today for a price equivalent to $33/barrel which is far less than oil. Your right. Obviously there is still DEMAND for oil thanks to stupid people and as long as that is the case it doesn't make sense to stop destroying the world to harvest it. I'm with you. Let me just buy some oil stocks...
yeah but does anyone use oil to heat their house? I heard of oil and coal stoves being used back in the day but its all electric and natural gas these days. Even coal would be more sensible since there are shit tons of it here in the states.
Solar and wind work just fine at the plant level. But there are bacteria that produce gasoline, diesel, and kerosene directly from sunlight and nutrient water and the process costs less than the current subsidized price of oil. So why do we give a shit?
Yes, though a repeater could be a cool concept to play with.
The problem with that is that for better or worse threads often have no relation to the parent comments. Sometimes the most interesting sub-threads are several levels deep.
This is easy to identify. Skepticism goes both ways. You have to be as skeptical of those who want to discount claims as you are of those making them. By assuming neither stance and acting as if the side which is backed by the most (in quantity and/or quality) evidence is correct you automatically keep a view that is open to change should the evidence scales tip the other way.
Just as science works toward an answer which makes correct predictions with greater consistency and accuracy you will be working toward views and methods of evaluating evidence that provide greater consistency over time.
"Established science has self-correcting methods such that even if some understanding was incredibly wrong, it eventually drifts into correctness."
True enough. But that doesn't make the understanding of established science at a given moment, on a given topic, correct.
Sound logic, combined with the scientific method, will give you the answer that has the highest probability of being correct at any moment. That won't stop you from being wrong, and on a daily basis. It just gives you the potential to lower your probability of being wrong next time.
You make a bigger assumption than that. You assume a chemical based lifeform that utilizes a system of intelligence similar to ours in the form of a brain.
Even on Earth we know of an intelligence that is substantially different than our brain. Birds have a brain which is substantially different in form and function from mammals. It is possible that there are creatures with intelligence we don't recognize because its form is drastically different from our own. Insects for instance could be far more intelligent than we credit. If you are looking for and expect to find simple behavior you are going to be looking for macro behavior patterns that can be explained with few primitives. Just because you find them doesn't mean there isn't more going on.
If we studied humans like we do ants we might find that our behavior can be simplified to a model of not much more complexity. Especially when you consider that we tend to favor behavior like our own and call it intelligence. For instance, tool usage.
Blasphemer! How dare you reveal the sacred mysteries of the FSM!
You must repent. Dress in full pirate regalia and say thirty "Yo ho ho"s and he will absolve you of your sin.