To be a little clearer - we have an evolution-provided brain model to copy, we did not have an evolution-provided rocket model to copy.
I can copy Kanji without understanding the meaning of what I'm copying... or even the basic rules of grammar. However, I'm not going to be able to write a new novel in Japanese.
You might also look into memristors, which show some promise as artificial neurons far more effective than simulating them with transistors.
Neurology is also starting to crawl out of the dark ages, and a renaissance there will immediately spill over to AI research.
It may turn out that we don't have to figure out how it works if we can 'simply' build a replica of a biological model in silicon... though I'd suggest that might be less than ideal as we'd probably want to understand how to program a mind before creating one that would be damn near functionally immortal and could operate faster even if not smarter than ours.
My point is that an AI breakthrough is somewhere between a decade from now and 'forever', but I wouldn't set any particular minimum with a high level of confidence.
Delta-V and time, because within the limits of your propulsion system you can trade energy for time or visa versa.
And if you want to get really nit-picky... also timing, because the delta-v requirements change as your origin and destination endpoint's relative positions change.
Wait. How about just 'timing, time, distance, energy, mass, hazards and Isp'?
Err... I want to change my answer to "it's really, really complicated"!
That's the beauty of cutting them off from the automated submission system after a very low threshold of bogus submissions (by percentage, quantity, or a combination).
It doesn't matter if they have an ulterior motive, they're shut down and have to pay a premium going forward... which means if they want to keep it up they'll be paying Google to employ extra verifiers and nobody else is affected.
IF Bogus_Takedown > 0
SET Require_Review = True
SET Charge_Fee = True
When their DMCA takedown request processing rate drops from millions per month to a few per day and comes with a bill for the reviewer's time, maybe they'll smarten up.
DMCA takedown requests for non-existent URLs, especially at a 99.97% invalid rate, should be evidence that the requestor is not properly verifying their DMCA claims and should:
A) Lose their right to continue to submit 'trusted' DMCA takedown requests
B) Be charged under the DMCA for filing false claims.
I have to disagree. To me, "a fair amount of success comes down to technique, not the written protocol" means you're not documenting your protocol adequately.
It would certainly be fair to say that some manual actions could take a lot of practice before the experimenter would likely be skilled enough to perform them, but there shouldn't be anything missing from the protocol documentation that someone attempting to reproduce the results would have to learn from scratch.
Excepting well-established standard practices of the field, of course. You don't have to teach from kindergarten up to post-grad.
I'm no bio researcher, but I am an IT guy and we could fill a library with books on substandard documentation making it difficult for others to follow in our footsteps.
>The technology, called Perspective, will review comments and score them based on how similar they are to comments people said were "toxic" or likely to make them leave a conversation.
Experience shows that toxic comments encourage participation as they simultaneously reduce participant satisfaction.
You want customers hitting F5 and (hopefully) seeing more ads on your site? Get people's egos involved and get them competing and hating on each other.
We've had flying cars for decades. The real dream is practical flying cars for the average person... which I don't see ever happening since they're fundamentally less practical than the non-flying variety.
From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.
It's a beautiful thought, but unfortunately it is completely incompatible with human nature, which is evolution's response to reality. Resources are scarce and everyone's competing for them to ensure their genes survive. Part of that creates greed, envy, and hoarding... consumer culture.
I'm sitting here conversing with people around the world, in a climate-controlled environment, with what's probably a pretty impressive understanding of my world (a world I've travelled) and universe given the limitations of my brain. I'm not worried about my next meal.
Since I'm NOT worried about whether the Gods are going to punish me, not worried about whether I'll make a kill on the next hunt, or if the flint spear I have will be good enough for the job... I'd say our system's working out fairly well. There's always room for improvement, though.
>the newest wonder-tech is generally always presumed to be 20 years away.
I think one of the most disappointing parts of growing up was discovering that. And also that the most popular 'wonder-tech' was almost always bullshit from the very start. When I was a kid, it was flying cars, and unlocking psychic powers. Now it's flying cars and warp drives.
>My suspicion is if you were willing to travel slow enough (or endure some time debt by accelerating and decelerating slowly to the speed of light), you'd have no problems getting to another star, patent free, using apollo era technology.
Look up Project Orion. Nuclear pulse propulsion that can get you up to around 5% of c, and it's likely there are not a lot of patents around the idea of riding a nuclear blast wave. You'll have a lot of trouble getting the nuclear material, though. Or building the massive ship required to safely ride the shockwaves. Anyway, that would get you to the nearest star in around 80 years.
Now, a fusion rocket (which we have yet to perfect, but is scientifically feasible) could go twice as fast, and would likely come loaded with patents.
Warp drives, like the EM drive, are impossible, and solar sails aren't practical for ships large enough to sustain humans on multi-generational missions. If we could even build such ships yet, because right now you'd probably be dead within a decade due to environmental collapse if not a lot sooner.
>Isn't writing out requirements in a way a computer can understand the essence of any programming language that has ever existed? So how is this any different?
It would seem this is another layer of abstraction that will make programming easier.
I would guess that there will still be a language to learn so you can give instructions to the computer and get optimal results. If they do it correctly, it's possible there will be a whole lot of details a human will no longer have to track... except when you have to debug the code, of course.
It continually amazes that the supply of people determined to infer what was never implied in an effort to justify issuing insults simply never runs out.
Hopefully you're at least slightly more socialized in real life.
Can we just hold progress back another 40 years or so? I'd like to be cold in my grave before the world changes so much I can no longer find my place in it.
Also, the massive social upheaval during the transition period between our current system and whatever replaces it is likely to be extremely unpleasant for the average person.
They could be satellite planets. Just as we now have dwarf planets, rogue planets, terrestrial planets, and gas giant planets.
For objects like Pluto vs. those like Earth, we could use a terms like 'major' and 'minor' (eliminating the term 'dwarf') to denote those bodies that 'dominate their orbit' or whatever measure the current definition of planet uses. Yes, this would involve also messing with the current definition of 'minor planet'.
I really do like the idea of a more or less empirical definition. Has gravity crushed it into a ball, and has it ever undergone fusion? Yes and no? Good. It's a planet. Now let's move on to the details, like what, if anything, it is orbiting, whether it's a tiny rock or a big ball of gas, and if it's the only significant object in its orbit.
>And orbiting has one *huge* benefit over anything built on a planetoid - you can keep your telescope pointed at the same spot indefinitely without any seismic disturbances
Except that Earth orbit involves having the Earth block your view a lot of the time, and the Moon can block or blind you, too.
Solar orbit is a lot less convenient for repair missions, but you can get much, much longer undisturbed exposure times if that's what you're looking for.
I think the first solution to behavioural problems was probably a heavy stick. The flint knife was a major innovation, and 'flint lashed to the end of a stick' was probably as far as we needed to go.
Unless, of course, the person with the behavioural issue was the one (or also) in possession of such a technological solution.
People are the problem, not the match-making system.
So long as people are willing to lie and manipulate to get laid or married, so long as they have unrealistic expectations and get vindictive when they're not met, there won't be an AI-managed dating app that will handle matchmaking well.
Anyway, the only matchmaking test you need is "do you find this person who is within a reasonable distance at least marginally attractive and have a shared activity you'd participate in together at least once?". The rest is bullshit.
It seems that a digital format standard allowing overlay, and then giving free licence to produce those overlays would be a good idea.
For video, I guess that's SRTs (maybe with improved handling so you can provide suggested positioning, color, and contrast along with the text?) and overdubbing, but really what you want to do is give people access to the editor's timestamp and an easy method for adding subs or SAP keyed to it.
Sell the original, fans produce and distribute the translation files. Seems kind of win-win...
Yep. I'm a Windows tech, so my knowledge of Windows and certain Windows-based apps keeps me employed. I could play with Linux at home (and from time to time I do, a little), but generally speaking I'd rather fiddle for an hour fixing a Windows issue than take the time to become comfortable enough in a new environment so I can deal with its issues (Linux isn't perfect...) for a slight overall improvement in my home environment and absolutely zero utility at work.
And the office isn't changing over anytime soon, since we run a large array of Windows apps. There's just too much inertia - we'd have to replace or retrain our IT staff, get all our software vendors to simultaneously put out Linux versions of their products (which is significant cost to them), and then put together and execute a major platform migration project.
It's just not happening. The short term pain is far too much to make the potential long-term gain.
It's not that difficult to feed fake GPS data to the antenna of your phone while shielding out any legitimate satellite signals.
If a GPS lock were standard, you could probably expect customs to have their exam room to be set up to mimic any location on Earth about six months after the standard came into effect.
Well... anything you'd call a 'script' wouldn't be 'AI', and you don't have to worry much about if you're treating an AI ethically unless and until you make one that is self-aware.
Of course if you've managed to make a self-aware AI, you probably also designed it to be happy doing whatever it is you built it for. Is it slavery if your AI wants to serve you even to the point of its own destruction, and in fact enjoys doing so?
I am no legislator, nor even a lawyer... but I think that any AI with the potential to harm humans should be requires to have sufficient safety features built into it to minimize the risk it presents to below that of a human performing the same tasks.
That puts human safety over cost savings: if the AI isn't safe enough, you can't replace a human with it regardless of how much more cost effective it is.
And that's pretty much the standard we see being used to judge driverless cars, not just because it's something you can measure and use to set insurance rates, but because it just makes sense.
Slashdot Mirror
To be a little clearer - we have an evolution-provided brain model to copy, we did not have an evolution-provided rocket model to copy.
I can copy Kanji without understanding the meaning of what I'm copying... or even the basic rules of grammar. However, I'm not going to be able to write a new novel in Japanese.
Scientists have already built an hippocampal prosthesis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocampal_prosthesis
You might also look into memristors, which show some promise as artificial neurons far more effective than simulating them with transistors.
Neurology is also starting to crawl out of the dark ages, and a renaissance there will immediately spill over to AI research.
It may turn out that we don't have to figure out how it works if we can 'simply' build a replica of a biological model in silicon... though I'd suggest that might be less than ideal as we'd probably want to understand how to program a mind before creating one that would be damn near functionally immortal and could operate faster even if not smarter than ours.
My point is that an AI breakthrough is somewhere between a decade from now and 'forever', but I wouldn't set any particular minimum with a high level of confidence.
Delta-V and time, because within the limits of your propulsion system you can trade energy for time or visa versa.
And if you want to get really nit-picky... also timing, because the delta-v requirements change as your origin and destination endpoint's relative positions change.
Wait. How about just 'timing, time, distance, energy, mass, hazards and Isp'?
Err... I want to change my answer to "it's really, really complicated"!
OK.... So how is it Google's responsibility to remove something from their index that isn't in their index?
That's the beauty of cutting them off from the automated submission system after a very low threshold of bogus submissions (by percentage, quantity, or a combination).
It doesn't matter if they have an ulterior motive, they're shut down and have to pay a premium going forward... which means if they want to keep it up they'll be paying Google to employ extra verifiers and nobody else is affected.
IF Bogus_Takedown > 0
SET Require_Review = True
SET Charge_Fee = True
When their DMCA takedown request processing rate drops from millions per month to a few per day and comes with a bill for the reviewer's time, maybe they'll smarten up.
DMCA takedown requests for non-existent URLs, especially at a 99.97% invalid rate, should be evidence that the requestor is not properly verifying their DMCA claims and should:
A) Lose their right to continue to submit 'trusted' DMCA takedown requests
B) Be charged under the DMCA for filing false claims.
But we know that will never happen.
I have to disagree. To me, "a fair amount of success comes down to technique, not the written protocol" means you're not documenting your protocol adequately.
It would certainly be fair to say that some manual actions could take a lot of practice before the experimenter would likely be skilled enough to perform them, but there shouldn't be anything missing from the protocol documentation that someone attempting to reproduce the results would have to learn from scratch.
Excepting well-established standard practices of the field, of course. You don't have to teach from kindergarten up to post-grad.
I'm no bio researcher, but I am an IT guy and we could fill a library with books on substandard documentation making it difficult for others to follow in our footsteps.
>The technology, called Perspective, will review comments and score them based on how similar they are to comments people said were "toxic" or likely to make them leave a conversation.
Experience shows that toxic comments encourage participation as they simultaneously reduce participant satisfaction.
You want customers hitting F5 and (hopefully) seeing more ads on your site? Get people's egos involved and get them competing and hating on each other.
We've had flying cars for decades. The real dream is practical flying cars for the average person... which I don't see ever happening since they're fundamentally less practical than the non-flying variety.
From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.
It's a beautiful thought, but unfortunately it is completely incompatible with human nature, which is evolution's response to reality. Resources are scarce and everyone's competing for them to ensure their genes survive. Part of that creates greed, envy, and hoarding... consumer culture.
I'm sitting here conversing with people around the world, in a climate-controlled environment, with what's probably a pretty impressive understanding of my world (a world I've travelled) and universe given the limitations of my brain. I'm not worried about my next meal.
Since I'm NOT worried about whether the Gods are going to punish me, not worried about whether I'll make a kill on the next hunt, or if the flint spear I have will be good enough for the job... I'd say our system's working out fairly well. There's always room for improvement, though.
>the newest wonder-tech is generally always presumed to be 20 years away.
I think one of the most disappointing parts of growing up was discovering that. And also that the most popular 'wonder-tech' was almost always bullshit from the very start. When I was a kid, it was flying cars, and unlocking psychic powers. Now it's flying cars and warp drives.
>My suspicion is if you were willing to travel slow enough (or endure some time debt by accelerating and decelerating slowly to the speed of light), you'd have no problems getting to another star, patent free, using apollo era technology.
Look up Project Orion. Nuclear pulse propulsion that can get you up to around 5% of c, and it's likely there are not a lot of patents around the idea of riding a nuclear blast wave. You'll have a lot of trouble getting the nuclear material, though. Or building the massive ship required to safely ride the shockwaves. Anyway, that would get you to the nearest star in around 80 years.
Now, a fusion rocket (which we have yet to perfect, but is scientifically feasible) could go twice as fast, and would likely come loaded with patents.
Warp drives, like the EM drive, are impossible, and solar sails aren't practical for ships large enough to sustain humans on multi-generational missions. If we could even build such ships yet, because right now you'd probably be dead within a decade due to environmental collapse if not a lot sooner.
>Isn't writing out requirements in a way a computer can understand the essence of any programming language that has ever existed? So how is this any different?
It would seem this is another layer of abstraction that will make programming easier.
I would guess that there will still be a language to learn so you can give instructions to the computer and get optimal results. If they do it correctly, it's possible there will be a whole lot of details a human will no longer have to track... except when you have to debug the code, of course.
It continually amazes that the supply of people determined to infer what was never implied in an effort to justify issuing insults simply never runs out.
Hopefully you're at least slightly more socialized in real life.
Can we just hold progress back another 40 years or so? I'd like to be cold in my grave before the world changes so much I can no longer find my place in it.
Also, the massive social upheaval during the transition period between our current system and whatever replaces it is likely to be extremely unpleasant for the average person.
> many moons would become planets
They could be satellite planets. Just as we now have dwarf planets, rogue planets, terrestrial planets, and gas giant planets.
For objects like Pluto vs. those like Earth, we could use a terms like 'major' and 'minor' (eliminating the term 'dwarf') to denote those bodies that 'dominate their orbit' or whatever measure the current definition of planet uses. Yes, this would involve also messing with the current definition of 'minor planet'.
I really do like the idea of a more or less empirical definition. Has gravity crushed it into a ball, and has it ever undergone fusion? Yes and no? Good. It's a planet. Now let's move on to the details, like what, if anything, it is orbiting, whether it's a tiny rock or a big ball of gas, and if it's the only significant object in its orbit.
>And orbiting has one *huge* benefit over anything built on a planetoid - you can keep your telescope pointed at the same spot indefinitely without any seismic disturbances
Except that Earth orbit involves having the Earth block your view a lot of the time, and the Moon can block or blind you, too.
Solar orbit is a lot less convenient for repair missions, but you can get much, much longer undisturbed exposure times if that's what you're looking for.
I think the first solution to behavioural problems was probably a heavy stick. The flint knife was a major innovation, and 'flint lashed to the end of a stick' was probably as far as we needed to go.
Unless, of course, the person with the behavioural issue was the one (or also) in possession of such a technological solution.
People are the problem, not the match-making system.
So long as people are willing to lie and manipulate to get laid or married, so long as they have unrealistic expectations and get vindictive when they're not met, there won't be an AI-managed dating app that will handle matchmaking well.
Anyway, the only matchmaking test you need is "do you find this person who is within a reasonable distance at least marginally attractive and have a shared activity you'd participate in together at least once?". The rest is bullshit.
It seems that a digital format standard allowing overlay, and then giving free licence to produce those overlays would be a good idea.
For video, I guess that's SRTs (maybe with improved handling so you can provide suggested positioning, color, and contrast along with the text?) and overdubbing, but really what you want to do is give people access to the editor's timestamp and an easy method for adding subs or SAP keyed to it.
Sell the original, fans produce and distribute the translation files. Seems kind of win-win...
Yep. I'm a Windows tech, so my knowledge of Windows and certain Windows-based apps keeps me employed. I could play with Linux at home (and from time to time I do, a little), but generally speaking I'd rather fiddle for an hour fixing a Windows issue than take the time to become comfortable enough in a new environment so I can deal with its issues (Linux isn't perfect...) for a slight overall improvement in my home environment and absolutely zero utility at work.
And the office isn't changing over anytime soon, since we run a large array of Windows apps. There's just too much inertia - we'd have to replace or retrain our IT staff, get all our software vendors to simultaneously put out Linux versions of their products (which is significant cost to them), and then put together and execute a major platform migration project.
It's just not happening. The short term pain is far too much to make the potential long-term gain.
It's not that difficult to feed fake GPS data to the antenna of your phone while shielding out any legitimate satellite signals.
If a GPS lock were standard, you could probably expect customs to have their exam room to be set up to mimic any location on Earth about six months after the standard came into effect.
Well... anything you'd call a 'script' wouldn't be 'AI', and you don't have to worry much about if you're treating an AI ethically unless and until you make one that is self-aware.
Of course if you've managed to make a self-aware AI, you probably also designed it to be happy doing whatever it is you built it for. Is it slavery if your AI wants to serve you even to the point of its own destruction, and in fact enjoys doing so?
I am no legislator, nor even a lawyer... but I think that any AI with the potential to harm humans should be requires to have sufficient safety features built into it to minimize the risk it presents to below that of a human performing the same tasks.
That puts human safety over cost savings: if the AI isn't safe enough, you can't replace a human with it regardless of how much more cost effective it is.
And that's pretty much the standard we see being used to judge driverless cars, not just because it's something you can measure and use to set insurance rates, but because it just makes sense.