Don't be fooled, Obama is dangerous, he will damage the future of America more than Bush. He has charisma so you have to be extremely careful to listen to WHAT he is saying, not how good it sounds when he says it.
I'm not sure if there should be any 'rule of thumb' or stated 'purpose' of copyright as far as income potential goes, as such; I like to think of money as "brownie points". The amount of money you should be able to get from a copyrighted work should be proportional to how much value you have, as a whole, contributed to others. If you write a book that is so good every person on the planet wants to read it, then it's OK in principle to earn so many 'brownie points' ('goodwill capital') that you can live off that until you die. If that means Mozart might've only written one great symphony and lived off the income, so be it, we just would not hold him in such high regard today (i.e. one should not try to 'twist' the system in a way that limits the earning potential from a single work to 'force' creators to have to keep coming up with new stuff... that'll happen automatically if your stuff isn't Mozart-quality anyway... broadly, I think the system is already working fairly well, on the whole, but this taxation idea is an abomination).
WTH? This is just sad. I feel sorry that you have clearly been experiencing a hard life, but insulting other people will not make it better. You are simply a disgrace. It is a shame that users such as this pollute the internet
Troll. You are implying that nobody is ever allowed to get angry about anything because it denotes instability. Bull, it's just a normal human emotion, suppressing it through stigmatisation and insults is disgusting behaviour.
Perhaps there was a misunderstanding, perhaps you just lack certain social graces in 'communicating yourself across', but when I read your anonymous post I *also* picked up a tone suggesting the same interpretations that the GP picked up. Clearly he's not the only one, it was something in your post.
Your arguments are also not exactly indicative of a healthy scientific mindset; you even admitted spending almost no time on it, and yet from that you boldly asserted that it is absolutely impossible that there might be any differences between this and a pacemaker. There are many differences that could lead to increased potential for cancer.
I don't really think anybody wants to "keep large economic differences". The rich are glad to be rich, but most of them are not rich *because* they're 'stealing from the poor'. Wealth is not zero-sum. Any humans can work hard and become wealthier without necessarily removing wealth from someone else. By "making the economic differences smaller", I presume you mean some mechanism for taking from the rich and giving to the poor (e.g. welfare). This is very dangerous, as it preaches a zero-sum economics model and gives people a sense that the rich owe them a living.
There's nothing wrong with being rich, unless you got there unethically.
It's silly to vilify the rich, because you can't aspire to be rich yourself if you think rich people are the devil. Eventually everyone is aspiring to the lowest common denominator.
So get a job, honestly, nobody inherently deserves to be able to survive decades from doing something once early in life unless it was truly highly valuable to society (in which case it should pay for itself, and shouldn't require forced theft of taxpayers to give somebody money for sitting on their butt). Go flip burgers or make new recordings or something, leeching from others is disgusting.
I rather doubt he very *literally* meant that the vacuum of space smells - that would be stupid - it seems obvious to me that he was just saying that when you work in space there exists a 'characteristic smell' that you will tend to encounter, which is in this case true. (But if it gives you an ego boost to interpret him overly literally, go ahead.)
Improving the process = making it more efficient = making it require less manpower = growth and increased competitiveness... 'there, fixed that for you'. It's a common mistake to think that purposeful inefficiency leads to higher job security - your competition is out there each day becoming more efficient than you. It's better to work for a company that is better at what it does than the competition and grows, than at the company that eventually goes under.
Most company owners / shareholders want to see growth; if you ever hang around serious traders you'll pick up that. But that aside, I own my own business too, and (like most business owners) if we increase our efficiency and lower our training times, I would MUCH rather hire new people and grow as a result of that, in fact I can't wait until we can 'afford to hire more people'. Being able to eagerly announce to our customers and to the world that we are shrinking would be of the most boneheaded business move I can think of - that NEVER looks good, and makes customers jittery. Being able to announce "we are expanding" is great for everyone - it makes shareholders happer, it makes customers happier and feel more secure, it improves employee morale.
It's true that there are "evil" people in this business, and many others; parasites whose main skill is rising to the top to either divest and plunder/raid corps (the 'favourite conversation') or (re-)focus on pseudo-cons to get more money out of people while helping them less (2nd favourite).
But ultimately it's not ALL like this, in the longer term, badly run companies do get weeded out of the market. If this wasn't the case, there would be no new drugs/cures/treatments coming from companies ever, which isn't the case; slowly but steadily, medical care is improving. And even if those disgusting 'evil' pigs retire to their mansions, sad as that may be, many companies are doing better things, and ultimately should do better in the long run. Public 'company trading' markets effectively create a "free market for companies", and hopefully owners who educate and inform themselves steadily migrate to more well-run companies (and the SCOs of the world, as we've seen, eventually breathe their last).
Meanwhile, there is another side to this coin. You might argue that the 'medical' company who panders to widespread yuppie insecurities (I don't know, some new 'herbal supplement' for 'stress', say, or detoxing, or whatever) might do well on the market because it'll make more profit because people fall for it. Well, the other aspect to make the system work well is an *informed* and *thinking* buying public. Companies do well selling unnecessary junk because THAT'S WHAT MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WANT AND DEMAND. Those "evil" execs are in the end just selling people what they want. If people were a bit more 'thinking-oriented' and realised that cures for actual diseases were more valuable and that the snake-oil products didn't work so well (ALL the freedom of information etc. is in place for this to happen, by the way), then things would sort themselves out.
(In short though, the solutions to these problems lie in more freedom, not more government intervention.)
I understand if you're sick and waiting for a cure or watching a loved one die of something, then "in the longer term" is no consolation, and you would rightfully be angry (I speak even as someone in such a situation). But there is unfortunately another important moral issue: Ultimately, should any one person (via the government) have the right to force somebody else to try to help them if they don't want to? I know I don't think I should be forced by government to help "fix the computers of poorer people" (say), if I could earn better money doing something else. Is there really much difference? Diseases are ravaged on us by a cruel natural world that doesn't intrinsically offer any solutions - every bit of help we do get from other people is a gift.
Let me get this straight, you think that AIDS drugs are designed to kill people, and out of the entire global healthcare system giving these things to tens of millions of people, it just happens that NOBODY has NOTICED? (I live in one of the most AIDS-infested countries on Earth (over 25% infection rate), everyone knows someone with HIV - you can't hide it - and huge portions of the healthcare system 'machinery' are dedicated to treating these people, millions of people are involved, so many people are on these drugs - lemme tell you, it would be impossible to hide if these things weren't helping people).
And anyway, why would drug companies deliberately try kill people? That's absurd, how long do you think they would stay in business or not get sued?
When did anti-corporatism become a mass cult? I'm not sure what's more disturbing, the fact that there are people with such rabid, absurd opinions, or the fact that you got modded "insightful"... I start to wonder if it's maybe become true after all that any "zomg corporations are teh evil!!!1!" opinion is considered insightful by default - "no thought required". While for various I generally support the idea of increased government funding of medical R&D, it's also clear that the private sector has a massive positive role to play - and if they want to make profits helping save peoples lives, then that's great, that'll encourage more players to enter the market and help more people.
So, essentially, a computer is an extension of my body?
Perhaps I was raised with a broad definition of the word 'tool', but yes, of course. Virtually everything humans make and use/control very quickly become extensions of us - be it computers, battleships, trains, tanks, pliers, airplanes (or flight sims), guns, musical instruments etc. Think about how it 'feels' to drive - it really feels like the car is an extension of oneself (at least intuitively that's always how it seemed to me). That's also one reason it's so natural and instinctive for us to even develop things like "car body language" when we're driving. All it takes is a bit of training.
Yeah, all those thousands of scientists are always making things up that would be insanely easy to refute yet magically nobody in the scientific community is able to --- fortunately we have more knowledgable people like rucs_hack on slashdot to "call bullshit" on them, as the entire rest of the world hadn't noticed this obvious thing. Why don't you actually go *learn* how they measure those things? Just because you personally DON'T KNOW how, doesn't meant the methods don't exist.
There's definitely some truth to that. Consider this: Later this year, Internet Explorer (alone, never mind Windows) will have basically been continuously exploitable for 11 years running... now if most organisations still insist on sticking to it, I can only conclude that they're just not all that worried about the security risks --- maybe the problems and risks just don't bother people as much as they should. I think it's also reasonable to conclude that if Microsoft hasn't managed to make IE even reasonably secure (I know there's no such as 100% secure, but there are plenty of shades of grey) after 11 years, they are never going to, and even if they are, they certainly must have lost the benefit of the doubt by now.
There are other kinds of managers?:) In my experience there are only two possibilities, the manager likes the idea and it becomes "his idea" and quickly forgotten who suggested it, or he doesn't and it's as if it was never suggested, either way I'd say he's safe.
Just FYI, you mean "leak", a leek is a vegetable - sorry, I don't normally troll spelling/grammar, but it was mildly amusing reading your post and thinking of the vegetable each time:)
If companies were really all that bothered by security, they wouldn't nearly all be using Windows and IE;) (OK, kidding, sorta, but seriously though, just IE alone has literally been exploitable for over 10 years *solid* now!... makes you think. I used to think, yeah, security's a big deal to companies, but nowadays I reckon it may be more a theoretical concern than a practical one. Sure, espionage-style hacking probably happens all the time, but companies don't really seem to care about that, it's mainly downtime from malicious attacks that bother them.)
The problem with that is that "a computer being in use" and "having a user behind the computer" often don't correlate, so you DO need an easy way to be able to leave computers on whenever necessary. Even in a small organisation it is frequently the case that they do not. (For example, right now I'm busy running a huge Subversion database dump that will run well into the night.) There are many other such situations, e.g. large software, running conversions on large sets of data, research apps that require lots of calculations, large copies or downloads, etc.
If you had read anything about their research, or even read the whole article (granted, it's long), you would've realised that neither of them ever suggested that a huge database alone would create intelligence. Rather, the premise was that a huge database would be a prerequisite as PART OF a complete breakfast / intelligent system. I.e. you can have a big-ass database without intelligence, but you can't have useful intelligence without also having the big-ass database - the database is a basis on which you can build and do research on intelligence.
Troll... way to trash someone just for being mentally ill, and making assumptions about what he 'would have' achieved that nobody can possibly know. Somehow I bet he still achieved more with his shortened life than you ever will. Since you're so knowledgable about the field, apparently, how about you try to tell us what was wrong with his *research* rather than just label him a "nutty kook"... seriously, what did mentally ill people ever do to you to make you lash out so irrationally, or do you just get a kick out of it, like a schoolyard bully?
Someone might be using it... there are always a few late users. Trying to determine if a computer is in use in order to shut it down isn't always that simple.
I suggest a simpler, low-tech solution - just stick up visible signs in the labs, and on some of the major office floors, asking people to shut down the computers in the evenings... it won't be a 100% solution, but most people would probably comply, so for the comparatively little effort put in I bet you can hardly get a better return.
Just the energy savings on that many computers would be not insignificant.
Hmm... funny you say the economics of special-purpose devices as opposed to general purpose robots won't work, because I think it's the other way round (at least for the medium-term). There is going to be a huge market for billions of cheap special-purpose robots like Roomba but for just about every imaginable task --- and quite frankly, that market is specifically NOT going to want unpredictable devices that might decide to poison them or argue about washing the dishes or whatever, nobody will buy those because they'd be considered "broken" for the task - economics dictates that the market will want devices that do their job properly, simply, quietly, reliably. In the medium term (looking several decades ahead) special-purpose devices will also remain cheaper and easier to build, and we're already seeing the start of this era with things like Roomba or alarm clocks that run away from you etc. These new devices will appear one by one until there are just many that surround us and we'll be well into the 'age of robots'. I just can't seem to agree that everyone is going to 'want a Data'... geeks, sure, but most normal humans are far too inane too care, and/or also explicitly DON'T LIKE having anything more intelligent than them around. So I think most people are going to mainly just want predictable highly specialised devices in lots of little niches that do one task well - these will likely remain cheaper than a Data, and more importantly, predictable.
Perhaps in the long term Data-like robots will indeed become so cheap that the economics will become such that they'll replace special-purpose devices for most things. Then you'll basically have an electronic butler, I suppose, but most people would, I think, want them to behave quietly and subserviently, almost 'dumb'. Companies would want them for labour to replace humans. By that time technology will have changed society in so many other ways (e.g. things like genetically engineering offspring, cyborg-like integration with machines, and being able to live forever might all have become commonplace), it becomes virtually impossible to predict what society will be like. It's also hard to predict what the impact will be of the inevitable development of machines more intelligent than us; that could bring anything from a complete Utopia to a complete dystopia.
My point was based more along the lines that probably the vast majority of the robots in our future are not going to be generically intelligent but rather quite specific-purpose, e.g. devices like the existing Roomba, or perhaps a robot that can cook, or help out with tasks relating to caring for the elderly/sick etc.; I would be extremely surprised if Roomba started "learning to lie" or tried to poison its owners or any other odd suc emergent behaviours, and it thus seems most rash to suggest that suddenly we have to be cautious about trusting robots *at all*, or basically suddenly be suspicious of robots, which is more or less what the GGP post had suggested in its opening lines. It remains the case that we would have to purposefully program robots with generic and unpredictable intelligence - Roomba is not about to start exhibiting such behaviours, nor is any current machine vision algorithm, nor is any current speech recognition algorithm, nor are algorithms designed to pick up emotions or catch balls or walk or be able to kicked and not fall over and so on and so on - these are all aspects of building robots that we control very well, and are predictable.
If your premise was to assume that in the future all robots are going to be highly intelligent, then sure, I agree with you, but I don't necessarily see that becoming the case, I think very few will be.
The fictional "rabid fanboi" is a deliberate creation of below-the-line marketing companies in order to stigmatise the very behaviour of complimenting certain products, such as an operating system. The premise is simple; by creating a marketplace awareness and public ridicule of these hypothetical irrational individuals, *everybody* becomes less likely to make positive comments about something, simply for fear of being labelled one. It's just another public manipulation technique used by marketers, and I wish more people would be aware of it.
The same technique is used to stigmatise critical individuals too, e.g. creating in the minds of the public a mythological "rabid anti-(product-X)" figure, people become less likely to criticise a bad product, for fear of appearing rabid and irrational.
Re:Anthropomorphizing obvious simulation result
on
Robots Learn To Lie
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, don't anthropomorphize robots... they don't like it when you do that.
Seriously though, I think the article remains interesting mainly because of the angle that ties it back to the evolution of human interaction, how we came to be the species that has taken cooperation to absurd new heights, while at the same still having those among us who can't be trusted... clearly, as machines ourselves, we've gone through all these "evolutionary steps" ourselves that we now see in the very machines we're making. And that *is* interesting, and anthropomorphic metaphors - in fact, not even metaphors - DO apply. You seem to be making the assumption that there is something "special" about humans that makes us different to other machines. There's not, we're just machines too. When a human does X, you say it's "lying" but when a machine does the same thing, it's not? Why, just because you understand the programming involved but don't understand the brain's programming? I'm afraid I don't really see the difference, we're subject to, spawned by, and part of the exact same 'physics system' as robots.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be fooled, Obama is dangerous, he will damage the future of America more than Bush. He has charisma so you have to be extremely careful to listen to WHAT he is saying, not how good it sounds when he says it.
I'm not sure if there should be any 'rule of thumb' or stated 'purpose' of copyright as far as income potential goes, as such; I like to think of money as "brownie points". The amount of money you should be able to get from a copyrighted work should be proportional to how much value you have, as a whole, contributed to others. If you write a book that is so good every person on the planet wants to read it, then it's OK in principle to earn so many 'brownie points' ('goodwill capital') that you can live off that until you die. If that means Mozart might've only written one great symphony and lived off the income, so be it, we just would not hold him in such high regard today (i.e. one should not try to 'twist' the system in a way that limits the earning potential from a single work to 'force' creators to have to keep coming up with new stuff ... that'll happen automatically if your stuff isn't Mozart-quality anyway ... broadly, I think the system is already working fairly well, on the whole, but this taxation idea is an abomination).
WTH? This is just sad. I feel sorry that you have clearly been experiencing a hard life, but insulting other people will not make it better. You are simply a disgrace. It is a shame that users such as this pollute the internet
Troll. You are implying that nobody is ever allowed to get angry about anything because it denotes instability. Bull, it's just a normal human emotion, suppressing it through stigmatisation and insults is disgusting behaviour.
Perhaps there was a misunderstanding, perhaps you just lack certain social graces in 'communicating yourself across', but when I read your anonymous post I *also* picked up a tone suggesting the same interpretations that the GP picked up. Clearly he's not the only one, it was something in your post.
Your arguments are also not exactly indicative of a healthy scientific mindset; you even admitted spending almost no time on it, and yet from that you boldly asserted that it is absolutely impossible that there might be any differences between this and a pacemaker. There are many differences that could lead to increased potential for cancer.
I don't really think anybody wants to "keep large economic differences". The rich are glad to be rich, but most of them are not rich *because* they're 'stealing from the poor'. Wealth is not zero-sum. Any humans can work hard and become wealthier without necessarily removing wealth from someone else. By "making the economic differences smaller", I presume you mean some mechanism for taking from the rich and giving to the poor (e.g. welfare). This is very dangerous, as it preaches a zero-sum economics model and gives people a sense that the rich owe them a living. There's nothing wrong with being rich, unless you got there unethically. It's silly to vilify the rich, because you can't aspire to be rich yourself if you think rich people are the devil. Eventually everyone is aspiring to the lowest common denominator.
So get a job, honestly, nobody inherently deserves to be able to survive decades from doing something once early in life unless it was truly highly valuable to society (in which case it should pay for itself, and shouldn't require forced theft of taxpayers to give somebody money for sitting on their butt). Go flip burgers or make new recordings or something, leeching from others is disgusting.
I rather doubt he very *literally* meant that the vacuum of space smells - that would be stupid - it seems obvious to me that he was just saying that when you work in space there exists a 'characteristic smell' that you will tend to encounter, which is in this case true. (But if it gives you an ego boost to interpret him overly literally, go ahead.)
Improving the process = making it more efficient = making it require less manpower = growth and increased competitiveness ... 'there, fixed that for you'. It's a common mistake to think that purposeful inefficiency leads to higher job security - your competition is out there each day becoming more efficient than you. It's better to work for a company that is better at what it does than the competition and grows, than at the company that eventually goes under.
Most company owners / shareholders want to see growth; if you ever hang around serious traders you'll pick up that. But that aside, I own my own business too, and (like most business owners) if we increase our efficiency and lower our training times, I would MUCH rather hire new people and grow as a result of that, in fact I can't wait until we can 'afford to hire more people'. Being able to eagerly announce to our customers and to the world that we are shrinking would be of the most boneheaded business move I can think of - that NEVER looks good, and makes customers jittery. Being able to announce "we are expanding" is great for everyone - it makes shareholders happer, it makes customers happier and feel more secure, it improves employee morale.
It's true that there are "evil" people in this business, and many others; parasites whose main skill is rising to the top to either divest and plunder/raid corps (the 'favourite conversation') or (re-)focus on pseudo-cons to get more money out of people while helping them less (2nd favourite).
But ultimately it's not ALL like this, in the longer term, badly run companies do get weeded out of the market. If this wasn't the case, there would be no new drugs/cures/treatments coming from companies ever, which isn't the case; slowly but steadily, medical care is improving. And even if those disgusting 'evil' pigs retire to their mansions, sad as that may be, many companies are doing better things, and ultimately should do better in the long run. Public 'company trading' markets effectively create a "free market for companies", and hopefully owners who educate and inform themselves steadily migrate to more well-run companies (and the SCOs of the world, as we've seen, eventually breathe their last).
Meanwhile, there is another side to this coin. You might argue that the 'medical' company who panders to widespread yuppie insecurities (I don't know, some new 'herbal supplement' for 'stress', say, or detoxing, or whatever) might do well on the market because it'll make more profit because people fall for it. Well, the other aspect to make the system work well is an *informed* and *thinking* buying public. Companies do well selling unnecessary junk because THAT'S WHAT MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WANT AND DEMAND. Those "evil" execs are in the end just selling people what they want. If people were a bit more 'thinking-oriented' and realised that cures for actual diseases were more valuable and that the snake-oil products didn't work so well (ALL the freedom of information etc. is in place for this to happen, by the way), then things would sort themselves out.
(In short though, the solutions to these problems lie in more freedom, not more government intervention.)
I understand if you're sick and waiting for a cure or watching a loved one die of something, then "in the longer term" is no consolation, and you would rightfully be angry (I speak even as someone in such a situation). But there is unfortunately another important moral issue: Ultimately, should any one person (via the government) have the right to force somebody else to try to help them if they don't want to? I know I don't think I should be forced by government to help "fix the computers of poorer people" (say), if I could earn better money doing something else. Is there really much difference? Diseases are ravaged on us by a cruel natural world that doesn't intrinsically offer any solutions - every bit of help we do get from other people is a gift.
Let me get this straight, you think that AIDS drugs are designed to kill people, and out of the entire global healthcare system giving these things to tens of millions of people, it just happens that NOBODY has NOTICED? (I live in one of the most AIDS-infested countries on Earth (over 25% infection rate), everyone knows someone with HIV - you can't hide it - and huge portions of the healthcare system 'machinery' are dedicated to treating these people, millions of people are involved, so many people are on these drugs - lemme tell you, it would be impossible to hide if these things weren't helping people).
... I start to wonder if it's maybe become true after all that any "zomg corporations are teh evil!!!1!" opinion is considered insightful by default - "no thought required".
And anyway, why would drug companies deliberately try kill people? That's absurd, how long do you think they would stay in business or not get sued?
When did anti-corporatism become a mass cult? I'm not sure what's more disturbing, the fact that there are people with such rabid, absurd opinions, or the fact that you got modded "insightful"
While for various I generally support the idea of increased government funding of medical R&D, it's also clear that the private sector has a massive positive role to play - and if they want to make profits helping save peoples lives, then that's great, that'll encourage more players to enter the market and help more people.
So, essentially, a computer is an extension of my body?
Perhaps I was raised with a broad definition of the word 'tool', but yes, of course. Virtually everything humans make and use/control very quickly become extensions of us - be it computers, battleships, trains, tanks, pliers, airplanes (or flight sims), guns, musical instruments etc. Think about how it 'feels' to drive - it really feels like the car is an extension of oneself (at least intuitively that's always how it seemed to me). That's also one reason it's so natural and instinctive for us to even develop things like "car body language" when we're driving. All it takes is a bit of training.
Oops, sorry, indeed, my mistake, I got confused, I meant timmarhy, not rucs_hack!
Yeah, all those thousands of scientists are always making things up that would be insanely easy to refute yet magically nobody in the scientific community is able to --- fortunately we have more knowledgable people like rucs_hack on slashdot to "call bullshit" on them, as the entire rest of the world hadn't noticed this obvious thing. Why don't you actually go *learn* how they measure those things? Just because you personally DON'T KNOW how, doesn't meant the methods don't exist.
Unfortunately that suggests a roughly 70% chance it'd drop into the ocean.
There's definitely some truth to that. Consider this: Later this year, Internet Explorer (alone, never mind Windows) will have basically been continuously exploitable for 11 years running ... now if most organisations still insist on sticking to it, I can only conclude that they're just not all that worried about the security risks --- maybe the problems and risks just don't bother people as much as they should. I think it's also reasonable to conclude that if Microsoft hasn't managed to make IE even reasonably secure (I know there's no such as 100% secure, but there are plenty of shades of grey) after 11 years, they are never going to, and even if they are, they certainly must have lost the benefit of the doubt by now.
There are other kinds of managers? :) In my experience there are only two possibilities, the manager likes the idea and it becomes "his idea" and quickly forgotten who suggested it, or he doesn't and it's as if it was never suggested, either way I'd say he's safe.
Just FYI, you mean "leak", a leek is a vegetable - sorry, I don't normally troll spelling/grammar, but it was mildly amusing reading your post and thinking of the vegetable each time :)
If companies were really all that bothered by security, they wouldn't nearly all be using Windows and IE ;) (OK, kidding, sorta, but seriously though, just IE alone has literally been exploitable for over 10 years *solid* now! ... makes you think. I used to think, yeah, security's a big deal to companies, but nowadays I reckon it may be more a theoretical concern than a practical one. Sure, espionage-style hacking probably happens all the time, but companies don't really seem to care about that, it's mainly downtime from malicious attacks that bother them.)
The problem with that is that "a computer being in use" and "having a user behind the computer" often don't correlate, so you DO need an easy way to be able to leave computers on whenever necessary. Even in a small organisation it is frequently the case that they do not. (For example, right now I'm busy running a huge Subversion database dump that will run well into the night.) There are many other such situations, e.g. large software, running conversions on large sets of data, research apps that require lots of calculations, large copies or downloads, etc.
If you had read anything about their research, or even read the whole article (granted, it's long), you would've realised that neither of them ever suggested that a huge database alone would create intelligence. Rather, the premise was that a huge database would be a prerequisite as PART OF a complete breakfast / intelligent system. I.e. you can have a big-ass database without intelligence, but you can't have useful intelligence without also having the big-ass database - the database is a basis on which you can build and do research on intelligence.
Troll ... way to trash someone just for being mentally ill, and making assumptions about what he 'would have' achieved that nobody can possibly know. Somehow I bet he still achieved more with his shortened life than you ever will. Since you're so knowledgable about the field, apparently, how about you try to tell us what was wrong with his *research* rather than just label him a "nutty kook" ... seriously, what did mentally ill people ever do to you to make you lash out so irrationally, or do you just get a kick out of it, like a schoolyard bully?
Someone might be using it ... there are always a few late users. Trying to determine if a computer is in use in order to shut it down isn't always that simple.
... it won't be a 100% solution, but most people would probably comply, so for the comparatively little effort put in I bet you can hardly get a better return.
I suggest a simpler, low-tech solution - just stick up visible signs in the labs, and on some of the major office floors, asking people to shut down the computers in the evenings
Just the energy savings on that many computers would be not insignificant.
Hmm ... funny you say the economics of special-purpose devices as opposed to general purpose robots won't work, because I think it's the other way round (at least for the medium-term). There is going to be a huge market for billions of cheap special-purpose robots like Roomba but for just about every imaginable task --- and quite frankly, that market is specifically NOT going to want unpredictable devices that might decide to poison them or argue about washing the dishes or whatever, nobody will buy those because they'd be considered "broken" for the task - economics dictates that the market will want devices that do their job properly, simply, quietly, reliably. In the medium term (looking several decades ahead) special-purpose devices will also remain cheaper and easier to build, and we're already seeing the start of this era with things like Roomba or alarm clocks that run away from you etc. These new devices will appear one by one until there are just many that surround us and we'll be well into the 'age of robots'. I just can't seem to agree that everyone is going to 'want a Data' ... geeks, sure, but most normal humans are far too inane too care, and/or also explicitly DON'T LIKE having anything more intelligent than them around. So I think most people are going to mainly just want predictable highly specialised devices in lots of little niches that do one task well - these will likely remain cheaper than a Data, and more importantly, predictable.
Perhaps in the long term Data-like robots will indeed become so cheap that the economics will become such that they'll replace special-purpose devices for most things. Then you'll basically have an electronic butler, I suppose, but most people would, I think, want them to behave quietly and subserviently, almost 'dumb'. Companies would want them for labour to replace humans. By that time technology will have changed society in so many other ways (e.g. things like genetically engineering offspring, cyborg-like integration with machines, and being able to live forever might all have become commonplace), it becomes virtually impossible to predict what society will be like. It's also hard to predict what the impact will be of the inevitable development of machines more intelligent than us; that could bring anything from a complete Utopia to a complete dystopia.
My point was based more along the lines that probably the vast majority of the robots in our future are not going to be generically intelligent but rather quite specific-purpose, e.g. devices like the existing Roomba, or perhaps a robot that can cook, or help out with tasks relating to caring for the elderly/sick etc.; I would be extremely surprised if Roomba started "learning to lie" or tried to poison its owners or any other odd suc emergent behaviours, and it thus seems most rash to suggest that suddenly we have to be cautious about trusting robots *at all*, or basically suddenly be suspicious of robots, which is more or less what the GGP post had suggested in its opening lines. It remains the case that we would have to purposefully program robots with generic and unpredictable intelligence - Roomba is not about to start exhibiting such behaviours, nor is any current machine vision algorithm, nor is any current speech recognition algorithm, nor are algorithms designed to pick up emotions or catch balls or walk or be able to kicked and not fall over and so on and so on - these are all aspects of building robots that we control very well, and are predictable.
If your premise was to assume that in the future all robots are going to be highly intelligent, then sure, I agree with you, but I don't necessarily see that becoming the case, I think very few will be.
The fictional "rabid fanboi" is a deliberate creation of below-the-line marketing companies in order to stigmatise the very behaviour of complimenting certain products, such as an operating system. The premise is simple; by creating a marketplace awareness and public ridicule of these hypothetical irrational individuals, *everybody* becomes less likely to make positive comments about something, simply for fear of being labelled one. It's just another public manipulation technique used by marketers, and I wish more people would be aware of it.
The same technique is used to stigmatise critical individuals too, e.g. creating in the minds of the public a mythological "rabid anti-(product-X)" figure, people become less likely to criticise a bad product, for fear of appearing rabid and irrational.
Yeah, don't anthropomorphize robots ... they don't like it when you do that.
... clearly, as machines ourselves, we've gone through all these "evolutionary steps" ourselves that we now see in the very machines we're making. And that *is* interesting, and anthropomorphic metaphors - in fact, not even metaphors - DO apply. You seem to be making the assumption that there is something "special" about humans that makes us different to other machines. There's not, we're just machines too. When a human does X, you say it's "lying" but when a machine does the same thing, it's not? Why, just because you understand the programming involved but don't understand the brain's programming? I'm afraid I don't really see the difference, we're subject to, spawned by, and part of the exact same 'physics system' as robots.
Seriously though, I think the article remains interesting mainly because of the angle that ties it back to the evolution of human interaction, how we came to be the species that has taken cooperation to absurd new heights, while at the same still having those among us who can't be trusted