And you're assuming that the people who support a sentiment like "Fuck Islam" are, indeed, "vulgar racists" who would support the other sentiments as well. You're essentially saying it's impossible to oppose a belief system without hating the people who believe in it (or, by your account, the racial groups who are largely perceived as believing in it). In essence, you're dismissing entire classes of ideas you disagree with by not only conflating them with different but easier-to-refute beliefs (straw man fallacy) but by attributing this conflation to the people who hold the belief you're dismissing (thus to avoid the appearance of a straw man fallacy).
"Islam" is a religion. "Negroes", "GWB", and "the Jews" are people. There's a difference between attacking a belief system and attacking people. "Fuck Judaism" would be more appropriate.
members of minority groups don't have the advantage of thinking of themselves in "neutral," non-racial terms
Don't hold me responsible for how other people think of themselves. I would like nothing more than for minorities to think of themselves first as individuals and not as members of an ethnic group, and many of them do (immediate counterexample), but those who don't need to take responsibility for themselves. Sure, most people do identify themselves with a stereotypical group of people with undifferentiated interests and preferences, but they're supposed to outgrow it after high school.
I only have one out of three, and my mother and I don't discuss feminine genitals. But yes, even counting her it comes out to about half. It may surprise you but some people don't really have hangups about certain words--and the only reason, besides custom, that "cunt" is considered more vulgar than "vagina" is that "cunt" is of Germanic origin while "vagina" is of Latin origin. So, I don't have superstitious beliefs about certain words being "bad", and all things being equal I prefer Anglo-Saxon words.
For those predicting the imminent elimination/enslavement of the human race once ultra-intelligent machines become self-aware, where would the motivation for them to do so come from?
For many people, it's more the fear of the unknown. Try as we might, we can't meaningfully predict what conclusions it will draw and what motivations it will have after we turn it on. Given this fundamental uncertainty, it's prudent to consider the worst possible scenario. It's not unlike the precautionary principle.
Human numbers are following the same pathological growth one sees in a petri dish filled with sugar/energy - the bacteria grows like crazy until the energy/food is consumed. Then it dies off.
Care to tell us, then, why death rate is exceeding birth rate throughout the developed world? In the richest countries, the only source of population growth is immigration from poor countries. Overpopulation isn't the problem. Demographics are.
Let's imagine a world where wizards can throw fireballs by muttering the correct arcane spell and performing correct gestures. This is clearly a magical high-fantasy world, isn't it ? A world where wizards learn spells and then cast them... hold it right there. The wizard learns to cast a spell; that implies that there is something to learn, some cause-effect relationship to exploit. The utterance of certain words and making certain gestures causes a fireball to be emitted in that world, just like the acceleration of electrical charges causes electromagnetic radiation to be emitted in this world. In other words, the "magic" of that world follows its natural laws, which simply happen to differ from the natural laws here, and in no way violates them; therefore it is perfectly natural there, and therefore not supernatural.
If it's possible to develop an account of how the spell causes the fireball, it's not magical at all, just a counterfactual set of natural laws. On the other hand, if it's fundamentally impossible to develop such an account, if even the best set of natural laws allows no provision for fireball-throwing wizards (outside a special exception), then throwing fireballs is indeed magical and supernatural, and the study of wizardry would be more like a cargo cult than science.
Anyway, in my previous post I used the word "magic" in the common usage, where it means things which are seemingly impossible, miraculous or counter-intuitive - "inconceivable". A box which stays ice-cold even in the summer heat is certainly such a thing. They aren't that way to you, since you know how they work, but to anyone who doesn't they would be magic.
The point of Clarke's quote isn't that science is magical though--it's that through science we can accomplish and understand things that seem magical to less knowledgeable people. It's about the power of scientific knowledge, not about the fundamental nature of science. The purpose of science is to know how a refrigerator works, not to fall to our knees worshipping ourselves for conjuring such magic.
We could train the AI to "feel good" (understand: mood_level++ or whateva)
I hate to say it, but we aren't going to be writing a strong AI in C anytime soon. Intelligence qua intelligence isn't Turing equivalent. It'll probably be more like building a brain, which means (ironically) that evolved instincts are going to be included in the design.
Similarly, it seems logical that a human could not create a program that plays chess better than the programmer does.
No--that's like saying that a human could not create a machine that lifts shipping crates better than the human himself could. Humans can understand good chess-playing algorithms, even if we're not up to executing the algorithm ourselves. Fortunately, humans can also understand how to build an algorithm-executing machine that's better than us at executing algorithms, just as we understand how to build lifting machines that are better than our muscles at lifting heavy weights. All of these machines are fundamentally expressions of human intelligence, not intelligent beings in and of themselves.
We already have computers that are smarter than us when performing specific tasks, such as playing Chess or planning out the steps needed to build a Boeing 747.
That's because knowing how to do those things is within our comprehension, even if actually doing them would overtax our memory. I can comprehend the quicksort algorithm, but I would be hard-pressed to quicksort a 1,000,000 element array as quickly as a computer can. This is no different from understanding how a jack can lift my car while being unable to actually pick up the car without one.
What if our intelligence is a running program too?
It isn't--not in the same sense. Circuit optimizations are an algorithm that any Turing-complete system can execute. Human intelligence is many things, but a Turing machine it is not. A Turing machine can never solve the halting problem--a human being can, in at least some situations. There is a fundamental difference in kind.
Unfortunately, it seems to have partially backfired in the last century both in dietary and land use terms.
Just the last century? Come, now--the dirty secret of agriculture is that in dietary terms, it has almost always been inferior to hunting and gathering. If anything it was a desperation tactic among populations incapable of hunting and gathering, not a deliberate form of advancement.
When these intelligences appear they will be designed to help us. I find it unlikely that they will spontaneously become evil.
If something is designed to help us, it's not intelligence. Intelligence is autonomous and capable of choosing its own purpose. Likewise, the only reason to develop hard AI is to prove that we can. If we are prudent, hard AI will be trapped somewhere, incapable of directly influencing the outside world.
I know that opinion is split, but I think that people are generally geared to help each other and not harm - I don't think family units or civilization would exist otherwise.
Family units and civilizations spend at least some of their time helping each other (although there are more families than you know that are based on manipulation and where "helping each other" only goes one way). They do not, however, have to help other family units and civilizations. At best, they simply leave them alone.
No sooner would your spreadsheet application spontaneously become a 3D game engine than an intelligence designed for help spontaneously become a harmful entity.
The very essence of intelligence is the capability to spontaneously choose your own goals and actions. Creating an AI is more like having a child than writing a spreadsheet.
I dunno--if it's 3 AM and the police are knocking on MY door, I'd be willing to take a gamble that they'd just leave me well enough alone instead of calling the judge, assuming they're trying to enter my house for some minor and trivial offense.
I'm American. And yes, we do produce a lot of culture, but Americans by and large don't appreciate it. (One exception is music, but even that has been iffy.) And if you compare America to Europe or Asia, it's a clear mismatch. Which is why so many Americans prefer foreign cultures to their own.
The initiative is much more subtle than that; integrating English skills into chemistry might mean that the students are set reading as homework - background information for the course material. Integrating maths into geography could be the teacher guiding the pupils through statistical analyses. None of it is heavy stuff.
Yes, that falls into the other two categories I gave--either it's busy work, or it's something you would be doing anyway, even without the ideology. (Having to read a chemistry text is something they should be doing anyway--the only reason they wouldn't would be to route around them not properly learning to read early on.)
Children that hit secondary school (age 12) unable to write, or unable to write well, have been missed out by the emphasis on reading and writing at primary school. Continuing to emphasize "key skills" in secondary school helps these children both by giving them the chance to learn, and by showing them that it's important that they do.
Well if you continue working within a system where students advance in grade based on how old they are and not how much they've learned, of course you're going to have that problem. Having an ideology that deliberately mashes things together doesn't show them that it's important to learn these skills, it shows them that the school system is trying to indoctrinate them into thinking it's important to learn the skills. Even poorly-educated schoolchildren are clever enough to tell when an ideology's being pushed on them. On the other hand, if you properly teach on upper levels (which means not deliberately avoiding requiring students to use skills they should have learned already), it gets the point across naturally. I can't imagine learning math without word problems, and when you need a conscious ideology of "transferable skills" to use word problems, it's a good indication that they were taken out earlier on to compensate for students not knowing how to read.
And I'm not even going to start on how "IT skills" are apparently just as important as knowing how to use English and math.
I got the allusion--he was just taking it too far. And, given that science is fundamentally a body of understanding and knowledge, treating it as magic (even in the sense of the term you give) is just plain wrong.
I think people have too little appreciation for culture, here in China my friends (many in the Computer field) can rattle off 8th century poetry, and have a much deeper appreciation of history and culture. How many Americans can quote even a single poem?
Undoubtedly. I'd go as far as to say America doesn't have a culture. On the other hand, we're an economic powerhouse, we tend to win wars against well-defined adversaries, we do a lot of science, and until recently we were technologically advanced. Also, we have a vast and robust system of government that protects individual rights in the long run, even when our typically apathetic populace elects idiots to political office. One thing we gave up is our appreciation of art and literature, although we still manage to produce a significant quantity of it. Every civilization has its flaws. And I'd be hard pressed to choose between living in a society where everyone could recite centuries-old poetry and living in a society where you can publicly denounce the President. (OK, not really.)
That sounds like it could easily become the worst possible system. By analogy, if I'm learning German and physics at the same time, trying to get through a physics textbook written in German only pisses me off and holds me back from learning either. How the hell can you learn any one thing when doing so requires applying other skills you haven't finished learning yet? And if you've already learned the skill enough to apply it, applying it in unrelated ways just makes for more busy work (i.e. having to typeset your English assignments using DTP software). And if you have learned the skills enough to usefully apply them in other studies, then you'd be applying them anyway, ideology or no ideology (i.e. word problems--who didn't have to do this in math class as a kid?)
Just a while ago there was an article on Slashdot, describing how stem cells have been used to fix damaged spines in rats. Making the paralyzed walk again is a miracle straight from the Bible; if that isn't good enough for you to qualify science as "magic", then just what does it take ? Huh ?
Magic is the supernatural violation of natural law, science is the understanding of natural law. Stop pontificating.
I'd be satisfied with it--and I'm pretty sure the type of people who buy $600 of Apple gear the day it comes out can find a productive use of $100 of Apple store credit. It's not only better than nothing, it's significantly better than nothing, unless you want to act like a bratty child.
Slashdot Mirror
And you're assuming that the people who support a sentiment like "Fuck Islam" are, indeed, "vulgar racists" who would support the other sentiments as well. You're essentially saying it's impossible to oppose a belief system without hating the people who believe in it (or, by your account, the racial groups who are largely perceived as believing in it). In essence, you're dismissing entire classes of ideas you disagree with by not only conflating them with different but easier-to-refute beliefs (straw man fallacy) but by attributing this conflation to the people who hold the belief you're dismissing (thus to avoid the appearance of a straw man fallacy).
"Islam" is a religion. "Negroes", "GWB", and "the Jews" are people. There's a difference between attacking a belief system and attacking people. "Fuck Judaism" would be more appropriate.
Don't hold me responsible for how other people think of themselves. I would like nothing more than for minorities to think of themselves first as individuals and not as members of an ethnic group, and many of them do (immediate counterexample), but those who don't need to take responsibility for themselves. Sure, most people do identify themselves with a stereotypical group of people with undifferentiated interests and preferences, but they're supposed to outgrow it after high school.
I only have one out of three, and my mother and I don't discuss feminine genitals. But yes, even counting her it comes out to about half. It may surprise you but some people don't really have hangups about certain words--and the only reason, besides custom, that "cunt" is considered more vulgar than "vagina" is that "cunt" is of Germanic origin while "vagina" is of Latin origin. So, I don't have superstitious beliefs about certain words being "bad", and all things being equal I prefer Anglo-Saxon words.
General intelligence algorithm? Is there such a thing? Can it identify an infinite loop (halting problem)? I can.
For many people, it's more the fear of the unknown. Try as we might, we can't meaningfully predict what conclusions it will draw and what motivations it will have after we turn it on. Given this fundamental uncertainty, it's prudent to consider the worst possible scenario. It's not unlike the precautionary principle.
Care to tell us, then, why death rate is exceeding birth rate throughout the developed world? In the richest countries, the only source of population growth is immigration from poor countries. Overpopulation isn't the problem. Demographics are.
If it's possible to develop an account of how the spell causes the fireball, it's not magical at all, just a counterfactual set of natural laws. On the other hand, if it's fundamentally impossible to develop such an account, if even the best set of natural laws allows no provision for fireball-throwing wizards (outside a special exception), then throwing fireballs is indeed magical and supernatural, and the study of wizardry would be more like a cargo cult than science.
Anyway, in my previous post I used the word "magic" in the common usage, where it means things which are seemingly impossible, miraculous or counter-intuitive - "inconceivable". A box which stays ice-cold even in the summer heat is certainly such a thing. They aren't that way to you, since you know how they work, but to anyone who doesn't they would be magic.The point of Clarke's quote isn't that science is magical though--it's that through science we can accomplish and understand things that seem magical to less knowledgeable people. It's about the power of scientific knowledge, not about the fundamental nature of science. The purpose of science is to know how a refrigerator works, not to fall to our knees worshipping ourselves for conjuring such magic.
I hate to say it, but we aren't going to be writing a strong AI in C anytime soon. Intelligence qua intelligence isn't Turing equivalent. It'll probably be more like building a brain, which means (ironically) that evolved instincts are going to be included in the design.
No--that's like saying that a human could not create a machine that lifts shipping crates better than the human himself could. Humans can understand good chess-playing algorithms, even if we're not up to executing the algorithm ourselves. Fortunately, humans can also understand how to build an algorithm-executing machine that's better than us at executing algorithms, just as we understand how to build lifting machines that are better than our muscles at lifting heavy weights. All of these machines are fundamentally expressions of human intelligence, not intelligent beings in and of themselves.
That's because knowing how to do those things is within our comprehension, even if actually doing them would overtax our memory. I can comprehend the quicksort algorithm, but I would be hard-pressed to quicksort a 1,000,000 element array as quickly as a computer can. This is no different from understanding how a jack can lift my car while being unable to actually pick up the car without one.
It isn't--not in the same sense. Circuit optimizations are an algorithm that any Turing-complete system can execute. Human intelligence is many things, but a Turing machine it is not. A Turing machine can never solve the halting problem--a human being can, in at least some situations. There is a fundamental difference in kind.
Just the last century? Come, now--the dirty secret of agriculture is that in dietary terms, it has almost always been inferior to hunting and gathering. If anything it was a desperation tactic among populations incapable of hunting and gathering, not a deliberate form of advancement.
If something is designed to help us, it's not intelligence. Intelligence is autonomous and capable of choosing its own purpose. Likewise, the only reason to develop hard AI is to prove that we can. If we are prudent, hard AI will be trapped somewhere, incapable of directly influencing the outside world.
I know that opinion is split, but I think that people are generally geared to help each other and not harm - I don't think family units or civilization would exist otherwise.Family units and civilizations spend at least some of their time helping each other (although there are more families than you know that are based on manipulation and where "helping each other" only goes one way). They do not, however, have to help other family units and civilizations. At best, they simply leave them alone.
No sooner would your spreadsheet application spontaneously become a 3D game engine than an intelligence designed for help spontaneously become a harmful entity.The very essence of intelligence is the capability to spontaneously choose your own goals and actions. Creating an AI is more like having a child than writing a spreadsheet.
Well, we're pretty boned then. AI will likely empathize with other AI, but not with us--but to be fair, it will probably go both ways.
I dunno--if it's 3 AM and the police are knocking on MY door, I'd be willing to take a gamble that they'd just leave me well enough alone instead of calling the judge, assuming they're trying to enter my house for some minor and trivial offense.
I'm American. And yes, we do produce a lot of culture, but Americans by and large don't appreciate it. (One exception is music, but even that has been iffy.) And if you compare America to Europe or Asia, it's a clear mismatch. Which is why so many Americans prefer foreign cultures to their own.
Yes, that falls into the other two categories I gave--either it's busy work, or it's something you would be doing anyway, even without the ideology. (Having to read a chemistry text is something they should be doing anyway--the only reason they wouldn't would be to route around them not properly learning to read early on.)
Children that hit secondary school (age 12) unable to write, or unable to write well, have been missed out by the emphasis on reading and writing at primary school. Continuing to emphasize "key skills" in secondary school helps these children both by giving them the chance to learn, and by showing them that it's important that they do.Well if you continue working within a system where students advance in grade based on how old they are and not how much they've learned, of course you're going to have that problem. Having an ideology that deliberately mashes things together doesn't show them that it's important to learn these skills, it shows them that the school system is trying to indoctrinate them into thinking it's important to learn the skills. Even poorly-educated schoolchildren are clever enough to tell when an ideology's being pushed on them. On the other hand, if you properly teach on upper levels (which means not deliberately avoiding requiring students to use skills they should have learned already), it gets the point across naturally. I can't imagine learning math without word problems, and when you need a conscious ideology of "transferable skills" to use word problems, it's a good indication that they were taken out earlier on to compensate for students not knowing how to read.
And I'm not even going to start on how "IT skills" are apparently just as important as knowing how to use English and math.
I got the allusion--he was just taking it too far. And, given that science is fundamentally a body of understanding and knowledge, treating it as magic (even in the sense of the term you give) is just plain wrong.
Since when does my love for simple, Anglo-Saxon-derived words translate into disrespect for women? Half the women I know prefer the word "cunt".
Undoubtedly. I'd go as far as to say America doesn't have a culture. On the other hand, we're an economic powerhouse, we tend to win wars against well-defined adversaries, we do a lot of science, and until recently we were technologically advanced. Also, we have a vast and robust system of government that protects individual rights in the long run, even when our typically apathetic populace elects idiots to political office. One thing we gave up is our appreciation of art and literature, although we still manage to produce a significant quantity of it. Every civilization has its flaws. And I'd be hard pressed to choose between living in a society where everyone could recite centuries-old poetry and living in a society where you can publicly denounce the President. (OK, not really.)
That sounds like it could easily become the worst possible system. By analogy, if I'm learning German and physics at the same time, trying to get through a physics textbook written in German only pisses me off and holds me back from learning either. How the hell can you learn any one thing when doing so requires applying other skills you haven't finished learning yet? And if you've already learned the skill enough to apply it, applying it in unrelated ways just makes for more busy work (i.e. having to typeset your English assignments using DTP software). And if you have learned the skills enough to usefully apply them in other studies, then you'd be applying them anyway, ideology or no ideology (i.e. word problems--who didn't have to do this in math class as a kid?)
Magic is the supernatural violation of natural law, science is the understanding of natural law. Stop pontificating.
They were prosecuted for marrying someone of a different race, not for being a member of their own.
I'd be satisfied with it--and I'm pretty sure the type of people who buy $600 of Apple gear the day it comes out can find a productive use of $100 of Apple store credit. It's not only better than nothing, it's significantly better than nothing, unless you want to act like a bratty child.