Let me get this straight... so the objective of the society is to have 1% of population own more then the remaining 90% and have 15% of citizens under poverty level, 40% without medical coverage and the majority getting poorer and a tiny minority richer everyday astronomically? Am I missing something?
In other words, there just like every other second-place nation we protect
From what or whom, exactly, do you protect us?
Now that the USSR was revealed to be a stawman all that time, pitifully and desperately trying to defend itself from you, and the Islamic militants do not have any beef with us since we do not try to occupy their lands or prop-up their opressors they are out too. North Korea is only concerned with South Korea and you. China wants regional influence and to become a commercial power, their problems are with Taiwan. So let me hear your current list of monsters under our beds which need imperative, immediate, righteous, insanely expensive, corrupt and thugish defense by your corporations at the expense of our freedoms.
Yes like "to steal the show", I assume the show "belonged" to someone else at a time... The word "steal" was used only in reference to physical objects in the context of criminal activity and to other things in the context of jovial, joking expression. Until the media corporations and their appologists came along that is.
but aren't simply because it won't be useful to us.
The problem is not just "usefulness" but also the method of getting there. As I explained to another poster in this thread, using the "self-organizing" techniques will involve creation and destruction of sencient and self-aware but "unfit" for our purposes (research or otherwise) systems and then killing them to try new strains. Essentially mass-murder of vast numbers of AI "prototypes" is what would be required for our "awesome" achievement. I find the price rather steep and furthermore, since we have no insight into the actual inner workings of such extremely complex systems, we would likely end up creating something that appears friendly but is in fact psychopatically hostile.
You decide if "awesome" is worth genocide and such extreme risks.
Would you consider yourself the victim of cruelty if the universe instantly ceased to exist
That is the definition of "death" and yes if someone were to do something like that to you, he would be called "murderer" and persecuted most harshly.
If you wanted a prediction, I would say that AI probably will be developed in this fashion, and that humans won't get around to recognizing the "right to live" of non-human beings until later (when the AIs are intelligent and established enough to argue their case). I mean, look at how we treat animals.
If this happens, I give you another prediction: all the worst fears of man-machine wars will come true because we, due to the nature and complexity of the systems which would be "evolved", have no way of veryfing true allegiance of our new "servants". All we can do is test Turing style, externally, and a perfect psychopath is utterly indistinguishable from a perfect "friend" until it is too late.
1) Manifest this thought in a way other's can detect it using one or more of their five senses; and
2) Claim "first art" in a verifiable and legally-defined way.
All right. I will ignore your first neat "definition" of The Grand Sum Of All Actions Of Humanity For All Time Including Audible Flatulence for the moment and focus on the second:
Ahem... "first art"?! Could you care to explain this? What do you mean by this exactly? First how? No part of it (I will for the moment ignore definition of "art") was ever present in the universe before? Some portion of it? What precisely does your (I suspect made-on-the-spot) term "first art" refer to in this context?
I don't know why you picked out the word expression to go on an on about...
From your own definition: "while intellectual property is the tangible (visually, audibly, or tactilely) extemporaneous expression..."
I only respond to your assertions. Unlike you, I happen to be in a rather comfortable position of not having to make anything up, in addition to having wee little things like laws of physics on my side.
And, no. Information, by itself, doesn't constitute intellectual property. It must be manifested somehow, and it must be verifiably original to become intellectual property.
Goodey, we are getting more precise. So if information is not the "intellectual property", what is the problem then with duplication of the information itself? Is it ok to make a copy of the information and just the representation is forbidden? Original? What is the threshold of originality required? 100% of the "physical manifestation" as compared to all the others? 50%? 10%? How do you measure it? The only measure known to me is information contents (i.e. comparing bits of data) but you just rejected that. Be specific.
There's no basis of originality to the VAST majority of all human thought. An almost infinitely small number of people seek any claim of originality for some meager number of their thoughts.
Not until you manage to come up with a way to measure "originality" in an unambiguous and scientifically verifiable way. Otherwise your claim is just a wild assumption to be taken on faith.
Either they've claimed first art (verifiably & legally), so you have no claim of intellectual property
We will come back to this as soon as you define "first art" that is "verifiable".
we can record the audible "sounds" generated by those molecular movements
No we can merely translate the energy of air molecules into other forms of energy and use it to alter structure of some storage medium. "Sound waves in air" and "ordered motions of air molecules" are physically equivalent. One is actually defined as the other. "Sound" is defined as a sensory perception caused by vibrations of a bone in our inner ear, caused by the said "Sound waves". Note that other types of medium are possible such as water and solid materials, all capable of having their molecules vibrate in an ordered way. So you claim that we record the neural impulses from the inner ear receptors to determine originality! I am all ears(!) to hear more about this marvelous new way of veryfing the "IP"! And all without use of information science because as you just explained, IP is not the same as information! Marvelous!
Businesses everywhere, be they corporations or privately-owned, rely on copyrights, patents, trademarks, and servicemarks to generate revenue. Wages and taxes are paid from revenue. Without income revenue, you have no donations from business. Without income revenue you have no wages. Without wages you have no private donations. Without income revenue you have no tax revenue. If you turn the faucet off, no water will come out the other end of the hose. Money doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Thank you Captain Obvious for these truly insightful and enlightening discoveries. Now only if you kindly could explain what any of this
This argument ignores the fundemental difference between "thoughts" and "intellectual property"; thoughts are intangible and personal while intellectual property is the tangible (visually, audibly, or tactilely) extemporaneous expression of a thought or idea accompanied by a verifiable and legally recognized claim to "first art". Your thoughts can not be verified by anyone, and are not tangible until you express them, so no one can own any part of them.
Oh for Pete's sake, why dont you throw in a few "time-space-fluxes" and "consciousness-matter methaphysical transforms" into your definition. It would make it sound more scientific and might fool more poeple who are not paying attention. I am tired today so I will just point out some of the larger of the countless holes in your "argument". If your definition pertains only to "expressions" then the information itself is not part of it? If it is then thoughts, being certainly a form of information would apply. Say I listen to a song and then perform it myself exactly the same as the original (lets pretend I can sing that good). Is the song now being "xtemporaneous expression of my thought" mine? Are only the "expressions" "intellectual property"? As in vibrations of air molecules? Not the information that they correspond to? The magnetic fields that cause the speaker membranes to move? All of these "belong" to the "author"? What about then the information that is used to drive these systems? Is it his? The pattern itself? Which pattern? Can I encode it into a series of integer numbers? Is it still his? What about into a series of knots tied on strings? Or dots on paper? And just for a taste of grand insanity down the road: when I do "buy" the "expression", does that mean that I am entitled to any format of media and information encoding of it, because I bought the "expression"? This is endless.
In your properly functioning society, how is public academia funded? How about the private grants? Where do the art patrons and foundations get their money?
They get them from all the same sources as they always did: taxation and private donations. The fundamental difference, which you failed to grasp, is that in that system it is possible to pay for art and science without having to have "DRM enforcing" anal probes installed in all citizens.
Newton..born of a drive for status
Yes he was a fame seeking jerk. So? He would still do science because he loved it even if he could not get to boss others around.
Shakespeare...significant wealth
And he did that without the need for "intellectual property". I have no problem with people charging entrance to theaters and other methods of payment for physical access to live performances. Besides, he was just shrewd, and getting wealthy was just a bonus that came nicely along with what he loved to do and would do regardless: write plays.
Mozart and Beethoven, for whom commisioned works and box office receipts were their bread and butter, lived and died largely in poverty
Which has far more to do with the general misery of the societies they lived in then any sort of discussion on "intellectual property".
but *we* have control over the evolutionary pressures that determine its development... but I don't see why we can't build a bunch of intelligent robot allies
I suspect you did not think through the implications of what you are saying. Do you propose that we do what the evolutionary process did, consciously? As in breeding and then terminating (killing is a better word) the coutless "unfit" mutations that are sentient, self-aware but do not match our criteria of "allies"? The evolution had the luxury of doing just that.... I dont think you realise that we have no plan, method or system to get there without engaging in unspeakable cruelty the same way the completely amoral evolutionary process did.
True machine intelligence (the same kind that Humans use, which is what we're basing the definition on) is theoretically possible, but the real question is whether we can build such a thing. I'm inclined to say yes.
As time goes on, it is becoming increasingly clear that the answer might be something we dont like, as in "yes.. but".
What is happening as the research goes on is a new realisation is creeping in: it is quite likely we can build a true intelligence... but we have no way in hell of shaping or controlling many critically important details of its nature. In other words it will very likely to turn out that we can shoot the gun but we can't aim it. Even ignoring moral issues (if you turn a self-aware AI system off, are you commiting murder? Is changing its internal settings equivalent to the actions of one Dr. Mendele and his brain experiments? etc.), it is increasingly unlikely that a true AI system would be "useful" to humanity and quite likely a threat to it (we have no means for example to ensure "empathy" to other intelligent beings, us included, and thus will likely end up creating a supremely capable, perfect psychopath). This lack of control is the curse of the "self-organization" route which now appears to be the only way to get there.
Therefore consciousness isn't necessarily (I would say likely) needed for hard AI.
The problem is not consciousness, but an inability to autonomously adapt. Even animals can figure out some things related to their well-being on their own. The "Hard AI" systems are all incapable (in practice) of keeping up with their environment due to unbridgeable gaps between the flood of input data and their fragile learning systems (if you can even call them that). So the only way to use "hard AI" is to severly limit the inputs to a set of well known conditions. Thus it is quite possible to build "hard AI" factory automation but not a general-purpose AI system as the demands on its learning and cognitive abilities increase exponentially with each new enviromental element.
Do you think Hard AI is impossible, or do you think it's just very difficult?
The term "Hard AI" refers to the traditional logic/fuzzy-logic based systems that were researched for over 40 years now. Decision-tree parsers, various "frame based" natural language processing sytems, mathematical function based image and speech processors etc. In other words (roughly) "top down" designed AI infrastructures as opposed to "bottom up", self-organizing, neural-connectivity type systems which are frequently referred to as "connectionist" models.
The only real argument for Hard AI being impossible is that Human brains use some sort of magic to operate. Now that's bullshit.
You assumption is based on misunderstanding of terms.
Helen Keller, born blind and deaf. Could only see the word through hearing and touch.
You better sort this out before posting. Anyhow I was talking about someone who has only a singular teletype-like input/output channel, just as computer's text keyboard and screen are. That means no touch nor hearing that can be used for echolocation-like detection of positions of objects.
Not so different from people. If I gave a rubix cube to a rwandan child. HE'd problbly use it liek a ball or throw it away.
Yes it is quite different, since the child can be easily told about the game and she/he will quickly infer what to do with the cube. The robot you describe would have to be programmed step by step to first "recognize" it, then have the physicists and programmers construct its internal "model" of the cube with all its complexities of moving parts, following which appropriate verbal labels would have to be installed. In other words your machine is incapable of indpendent learning because it lacks the capacity for inductive reasoning, it is merely a database of "hard-wired rule matches at coordinates x,y,z with color c, that must be object O, therefore trigger action A".
Its non-trivial but totally doable with a team of programmers and physicists. It requires no real research as the problems are straight forward modeling grunt work mainly. Building a road from the east coast to the west coast is non-trivial but is something we can do with today's technology. In fact we have! I think the problem why we haven't built non-trivial AI is that no one had the roadmap.
The system you proposed is one of the oldest in AI research. I recall reading a book in 1970s about a computer who was modelling (a rather simple) 3d world composed of cubes and was being asked simple questions, in simplistic vocabulary, dealing with that simplistic world. The problem is not the "coupling" of language with the model but the machine's inability to perform many kinds of reasoning required to perform tasks and furthermore to infere from the existing model components some other, not previously hard-coded, rules governing them. That is what is essential for any semblance of intelligence.
Otherwise your robot will attempt to stuff the fancy coffee maker you just bought your wife for Christmas into the trash because it was never programmed to recognize that shape and its nearest model is "useless trash object" coupled with routine "dispose of trash". Or wash the cat in a washing machine: "dirty fur". Essentially you are describing a mindless automaton, akin to the mechanical dolls of 18th century, only yours has a lot of cogs in it. Your "solution" to making it appear more intelligent is to make more cogs, forgetting completely that true intelligence is self-organizing.
I agree with you there. Not only is hard AI bullshit but even all the "connectionist" models proposed are seriously kooky. None of them addresses the issue of tight coupling between high level reasoning and extremely low level granularity of experience being fed into such system.
In other words, the language of the neural system is based on the indvidual pulses of the neurons and the language of consciousness is based on extremely high-level inductive operations and transformations, some of them associated with an abstraction framework called "language". That huge gap is what is thwarting the whole body of AI research for 5 decades now.
And before someone shouts "but computers are processing bits too", let me point out that in order to define a simplest of terms such as a "dot in my 3-dimentional visual field" requires massive pre-processing of rivers of visual data in order to formulate a 3-dimensional world model, infere from that model existence of individual "objects" called dots and then assign proper labeling to them. And that is just the absolutely pre-eliminary step to achieving serious natural language processing. Because otherwise when you say "a dot" to the computer, the machine can understand a sequence of letters "d", "o", "t", but not their "meaning" as people do, with all the implications of 3-dimensional geomerty which are implicitly embedded in such a simple term. Note that people who were born blind do have this capability but their internal models are based on other input channels such as touch and physical manipulation of 3-dimensional objects as well as thermal detecion of their proximity and similiar nuances.
Noone truly knows for sure (for such condition never arose) but if someone were to be born blind and deprived of all other sensory channels with the exception of speech and hearing (it would have to be restricted to spoken language only) odds are great that he/she would not be able to develop conscious thought. That is the situation the computers are in at the present. Their vision systems are totally de-coupled from the natural language processing sytems and this DARPA silliness makes it purposefully so.
And even if it didnt, noone has come up with any satisfactory method to even remotely bridge the gap.
Since noone on Earth (and I suspect this extends to the whole wide Universe) has even a tiniest of the most remote and foggiest ideas about what "your points" truly are, and much less as to how to go about "making them", I must humbly and respectfully decline this praise assigned so generously but prematurely, to me.
In a world where the citizens of most developed nations have half their incomes wrested from them by the state (slaves only paid about a quarter, effectively), how widely supported do you think the idea of "freedom" is? Look at the recent report about American high school students having almost no respect for the first amendment? In a world where there still exist ANY people who think socialism is a good thing (hello slashdot posters!), it's too risky to tie the acceptance of open source to the acceptance of freedom.
Sir, may I be the first one to tell you that you are an Awesomely Grand And Amazingly Unstable Libertarian Nut. You would be quite amusing but it appears that some of your hallucinations (they appear to you as "facts" such as 50% taxation accross the board in "most" developed nations) and "ideas" are being taken seriously by your fellow patients. Therefore I only ask you this: kindly take your delusions of government-less, market-is-divinely-infallable, dog-eat-dog, "freedom" society and try to make it work on an island, preferrably far away in the middle of an ocean so when the thing implodes explosively we wont get any half-eaten chunks of Libertarian Heros blowing our way. Thank you so very much in advance.
If you can find someone that doesn't EVER profit by breaking copyright laws (or plan to), but still thinks it's ok, point me at them. I'd like to hear what they have say.
I do not wish to offend, but that is a cop-out. It is extremely unlikely that people not involved directly in the fray would be anywhere near as interested and passionate about it. That is like saying that China should have decided if the American British Colonies should be granted independence, since the opinions of the British, the Revolutionaries and some other Europeans were suspect because they all had a dog in the fight.
Rather then being a courtoom polemic, this is a battle and those who will muster better armies will win it, and "only" the future of humanity is at stake. You may wait for your impeccable impartial arbiter for a looooong time and when he comes, the dust will be long settled over the battlefield.
I must say, it's been quite a while since I've come in contact with someone as manic as you.
Please seek help. Immediately.
A message of "I surrender my utterly undefensible position but I can't think of a face-saving way to do it so I will just pretend my opponent is somehow illegitmate" received and accepted.
I wish you Good Luck and please do try to remember that some things which are widely accepted as "obvious" without any thought might actually be nothing of the kind and instead due to someone's usurping agenda and large propaganda budget. "Intellectual Property" is a shining example of this.
The issue is taking said transmissions and REBROADCASTING them. In this case, over the internet.
Dear me! That changes everything! You mean the elctromagnetic waves were actually... oh my... wait for it... amplified in the receiver! And then, I am not sure if the terror of it will not kill me, someone dared to superimpose more waves encoding English text on top of existing ones!! Oh the horror!! And then in a fit of total devilry they let the amplified waves escape their equipment! And probably Satan himself, personally, transformed the waves into their numeric equivalent and stored them on a computer which allowed them to travel over another medium! Will the horrors never end!?
Just for curiosity sake, where in this process did the evil deed occur? At the point of internal amplification in the reciever? The amplified waves leaving it? Digitization? The numeric data leaving the computer? How is that different from the amplified analog waves leaving the receiver? If I were to provide means of supplying sub-titles independently so people can use their own receivers and superimpose them there, would I be doing equally evil deed? Are they all "thieves" then for receiving and amplifying the signal within their own receivers? Hmm? Sorry man, you cant get out of this jam no matter how you try.
grasp that very simple concept
Elecromagnetic radiation can be amplified and digitized with proper equipment. Yes it would seem rather simple, what was that you were saying?
In fact, it is so simple to grasp that one can only conclude that you are arguing this point only for the sake of trolling.
Careful here, I could accuse you of the same thing and I do have physics on my side!
You deserve a medal for your ability to twist words.
Let me look into this in detail...
You said: By limiting access to something based on geographic location the copyright holder has effectively restricted the physical location.
From which I concluded that you consider a mere mental desire to limit access to be equal to physical restriction, since the only means at the disposal of Japanese TV is saying that they do not wish their transmissions to be picked up elsewhere. The electromagnetic radiation has the uncanny habit of not giving a flying fuck as to what self-righteous people want and just travels according to laws of physics. It even has the hutzpa to ignore their profit motive, why that ungrateful etheral bastard! And so I question you on this tidbit, and you respond with something to the effect of "You twisted my words!" Well then, please rephrase it in such a way that its meaning is unambiguous and do thwart my twisted ways, by all means!
P.S. I would like to point out to you that it is not my ability to twist things (although I am flattered that you think so highly of me) but the tangled web of illogic, which you began to weave as soon as you fell into the trap of trying to treat information as "private property" capable of being "stolen", which presents to me more and more opportunities to point out glaring absurdity as you struggle more and more desperately in its grip.
Is that greed as in, "I could go to the store and buy it legally, or change the law, or move to another place where I like the law, but I think I'll just copy instead." Maybe that's sloth, not greed.
Fighting insane laws is a long process which begins with convincing people of their wrongness, this is where were at. You assumed that I actually do the copying habitually, which I do not. There is a difference betwen a moral and phillosophical stance and a desire to watch inane animations or imbecillic TV programs.
Perhaps the greed is in, "I didn't write the script, draw the pictures, or create the music, but I'm entitled to them anyway.?"
That has nothing to do with "entitlement" and everything to do with the nature of information. Since it is physically impossible to make information into "private property", from there it flows that it is also impossible to trade it in the same manner as you can trade pieces of coal. Thus instead of turning the argument on its head and speaking of "entiltement" we should be discussing how to make sure that true artists are able to express themselves and thus expand our civilization while they are provided with necessities of life and recognition they deserve.
Or maybe it's just delusions of grandeur, like, "Foo can't be owned. I'm entitled to foo because I could create foo just as well. Anyone can. I just don't happen to feel like it today."
Again you are trying to turn the core argument I am making into something it is not, as in "everyone can create art of equal caliber". I speak nothing of the kind, I am concerned exclusively with the unfitness of information to be "private property".
By limiting access to something based on geographic location the copyright holder has effectively restricted the physical location.
Whoa there! You mean to tell me that a building with doors, locks, guards built on a parcel of land into which your body must physically make a trip is the same as someone standing up and saying "You there! 2031 miles to the West! Behind that hill! Close your eyes or I will sue you!"
And you are calling me dellusional?
To explore this amusing insanity further, do you purport that the light particles bouncing off the stadium during a game are property of the NFL? To the end of time? What if I were to sit in a house I own next door with a telescope? In orbit? On Mars? Hmm?
No, you do not have the right to see, read, listen to or whatever every single thing created.
In which case you do not have right to exist, since you just neatly defined the totality of our experiences as members of society. Everything related to civilization, starting at times immemorial, is like that. In fact we would not be here if it were the way you seem to think it should work because you will be still paying per-copy fee to the inventor of the "wheel" (he has absolute and never ending rights to his creation, which he passed onto his heirs, no?).
Slashdot Mirror
Let me get this straight... so the objective of the society is to have 1% of population own more then the remaining 90% and have 15% of citizens under poverty level, 40% without medical coverage and the majority getting poorer and a tiny minority richer everyday astronomically? Am I missing something?
From what or whom, exactly, do you protect us?
Now that the USSR was revealed to be a stawman all that time, pitifully and desperately trying to defend itself from you, and the Islamic militants do not have any beef with us since we do not try to occupy their lands or prop-up their opressors they are out too. North Korea is only concerned with South Korea and you. China wants regional influence and to become a commercial power, their problems are with Taiwan. So let me hear your current list of monsters under our beds which need imperative, immediate, righteous, insanely expensive, corrupt and thugish defense by your corporations at the expense of our freedoms.
Yes like "to steal the show", I assume the show "belonged" to someone else at a time ... The word "steal" was used only in reference to physical objects in the context of criminal activity and to other things in the context of jovial, joking expression. Until the media corporations and their appologists came along that is.
The problem is not just "usefulness" but also the method of getting there. As I explained to another poster in this thread, using the "self-organizing" techniques will involve creation and destruction of sencient and self-aware but "unfit" for our purposes (research or otherwise) systems and then killing them to try new strains. Essentially mass-murder of vast numbers of AI "prototypes" is what would be required for our "awesome" achievement. I find the price rather steep and furthermore, since we have no insight into the actual inner workings of such extremely complex systems, we would likely end up creating something that appears friendly but is in fact psychopatically hostile.
You decide if "awesome" is worth genocide and such extreme risks.
That is the definition of "death" and yes if someone were to do something like that to you, he would be called "murderer" and persecuted most harshly.
If you wanted a prediction, I would say that AI probably will be developed in this fashion, and that humans won't get around to recognizing the "right to live" of non-human beings until later (when the AIs are intelligent and established enough to argue their case). I mean, look at how we treat animals.
If this happens, I give you another prediction: all the worst fears of man-machine wars will come true because we, due to the nature and complexity of the systems which would be "evolved", have no way of veryfing true allegiance of our new "servants". All we can do is test Turing style, externally, and a perfect psychopath is utterly indistinguishable from a perfect "friend" until it is too late.
2) Claim "first art" in a verifiable and legally-defined way.
All right. I will ignore your first neat "definition" of The Grand Sum Of All Actions Of Humanity For All Time Including Audible Flatulence for the moment and focus on the second:
Ahem... "first art"?! Could you care to explain this? What do you mean by this exactly? First how? No part of it (I will for the moment ignore definition of "art") was ever present in the universe before? Some portion of it? What precisely does your (I suspect made-on-the-spot) term "first art" refer to in this context?
I don't know why you picked out the word expression to go on an on about...
From your own definition: "while intellectual property is the tangible (visually, audibly, or tactilely) extemporaneous expression ..."
I only respond to your assertions. Unlike you, I happen to be in a rather comfortable position of not having to make anything up, in addition to having wee little things like laws of physics on my side.
And, no. Information, by itself, doesn't constitute intellectual property. It must be manifested somehow, and it must be verifiably original to become intellectual property.
Goodey, we are getting more precise. So if information is not the "intellectual property", what is the problem then with duplication of the information itself? Is it ok to make a copy of the information and just the representation is forbidden? Original? What is the threshold of originality required? 100% of the "physical manifestation" as compared to all the others? 50%? 10%? How do you measure it? The only measure known to me is information contents (i.e. comparing bits of data) but you just rejected that. Be specific.
There's no basis of originality to the VAST majority of all human thought. An almost infinitely small number of people seek any claim of originality for some meager number of their thoughts.
Not until you manage to come up with a way to measure "originality" in an unambiguous and scientifically verifiable way. Otherwise your claim is just a wild assumption to be taken on faith.
Either they've claimed first art (verifiably & legally), so you have no claim of intellectual property
We will come back to this as soon as you define "first art" that is "verifiable".
we can record the audible "sounds" generated by those molecular movements
No we can merely translate the energy of air molecules into other forms of energy and use it to alter structure of some storage medium. "Sound waves in air" and "ordered motions of air molecules" are physically equivalent. One is actually defined as the other. "Sound" is defined as a sensory perception caused by vibrations of a bone in our inner ear, caused by the said "Sound waves". Note that other types of medium are possible such as water and solid materials, all capable of having their molecules vibrate in an ordered way. So you claim that we record the neural impulses from the inner ear receptors to determine originality! I am all ears(!) to hear more about this marvelous new way of veryfing the "IP"! And all without use of information science because as you just explained, IP is not the same as information! Marvelous!
Businesses everywhere, be they corporations or privately-owned, rely on copyrights, patents, trademarks, and servicemarks to generate revenue. Wages and taxes are paid from revenue. Without income revenue, you have no donations from business. Without income revenue you have no wages. Without wages you have no private donations. Without income revenue you have no tax revenue. If you turn the faucet off, no water will come out the other end of the hose. Money doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Thank you Captain Obvious for these truly insightful and enlightening discoveries. Now only if you kindly could explain what any of this
Oh for Pete's sake, why dont you throw in a few "time-space-fluxes" and "consciousness-matter methaphysical transforms" into your definition. It would make it sound more scientific and might fool more poeple who are not paying attention. I am tired today so I will just point out some of the larger of the countless holes in your "argument". If your definition pertains only to "expressions" then the information itself is not part of it? If it is then thoughts, being certainly a form of information would apply. Say I listen to a song and then perform it myself exactly the same as the original (lets pretend I can sing that good). Is the song now being "xtemporaneous expression of my thought" mine? Are only the "expressions" "intellectual property"? As in vibrations of air molecules? Not the information that they correspond to? The magnetic fields that cause the speaker membranes to move? All of these "belong" to the "author"? What about then the information that is used to drive these systems? Is it his? The pattern itself? Which pattern? Can I encode it into a series of integer numbers? Is it still his? What about into a series of knots tied on strings? Or dots on paper? And just for a taste of grand insanity down the road: when I do "buy" the "expression", does that mean that I am entitled to any format of media and information encoding of it, because I bought the "expression"? This is endless.
In your properly functioning society, how is public academia funded? How about the private grants? Where do the art patrons and foundations get their money?
They get them from all the same sources as they always did: taxation and private donations. The fundamental difference, which you failed to grasp, is that in that system it is possible to pay for art and science without having to have "DRM enforcing" anal probes installed in all citizens.
Newton..born of a drive for status
Yes he was a fame seeking jerk. So? He would still do science because he loved it even if he could not get to boss others around.
Shakespeare ...significant wealth
And he did that without the need for "intellectual property". I have no problem with people charging entrance to theaters and other methods of payment for physical access to live performances. Besides, he was just shrewd, and getting wealthy was just a bonus that came nicely along with what he loved to do and would do regardless: write plays.
Mozart and Beethoven, for whom commisioned works and box office receipts were their bread and butter, lived and died largely in poverty
Which has far more to do with the general misery of the societies they lived in then any sort of discussion on "intellectual property".
I suspect you did not think through the implications of what you are saying. Do you propose that we do what the evolutionary process did, consciously? As in breeding and then terminating (killing is a better word) the coutless "unfit" mutations that are sentient, self-aware but do not match our criteria of "allies"? The evolution had the luxury of doing just that.... I dont think you realise that we have no plan, method or system to get there without engaging in unspeakable cruelty the same way the completely amoral evolutionary process did.
As time goes on, it is becoming increasingly clear that the answer might be something we dont like, as in "yes.. but".
What is happening as the research goes on is a new realisation is creeping in: it is quite likely we can build a true intelligence... but we have no way in hell of shaping or controlling many critically important details of its nature. In other words it will very likely to turn out that we can shoot the gun but we can't aim it. Even ignoring moral issues (if you turn a self-aware AI system off, are you commiting murder? Is changing its internal settings equivalent to the actions of one Dr. Mendele and his brain experiments? etc.), it is increasingly unlikely that a true AI system would be "useful" to humanity and quite likely a threat to it (we have no means for example to ensure "empathy" to other intelligent beings, us included, and thus will likely end up creating a supremely capable, perfect psychopath). This lack of control is the curse of the "self-organization" route which now appears to be the only way to get there.
Only time will tell what will become of this.
The problem is not consciousness, but an inability to autonomously adapt. Even animals can figure out some things related to their well-being on their own. The "Hard AI" systems are all incapable (in practice) of keeping up with their environment due to unbridgeable gaps between the flood of input data and their fragile learning systems (if you can even call them that). So the only way to use "hard AI" is to severly limit the inputs to a set of well known conditions. Thus it is quite possible to build "hard AI" factory automation but not a general-purpose AI system as the demands on its learning and cognitive abilities increase exponentially with each new enviromental element.
The term "Hard AI" refers to the traditional logic/fuzzy-logic based systems that were researched for over 40 years now. Decision-tree parsers, various "frame based" natural language processing sytems, mathematical function based image and speech processors etc. In other words (roughly) "top down" designed AI infrastructures as opposed to "bottom up", self-organizing, neural-connectivity type systems which are frequently referred to as "connectionist" models.
The only real argument for Hard AI being impossible is that Human brains use some sort of magic to operate. Now that's bullshit.
You assumption is based on misunderstanding of terms.
You better sort this out before posting. Anyhow I was talking about someone who has only a singular teletype-like input/output channel, just as computer's text keyboard and screen are. That means no touch nor hearing that can be used for echolocation-like detection of positions of objects.
Yes it is quite different, since the child can be easily told about the game and she/he will quickly infer what to do with the cube. The robot you describe would have to be programmed step by step to first "recognize" it, then have the physicists and programmers construct its internal "model" of the cube with all its complexities of moving parts, following which appropriate verbal labels would have to be installed. In other words your machine is incapable of indpendent learning because it lacks the capacity for inductive reasoning, it is merely a database of "hard-wired rule matches at coordinates x,y,z with color c, that must be object O, therefore trigger action A".
The system you proposed is one of the oldest in AI research. I recall reading a book in 1970s about a computer who was modelling (a rather simple) 3d world composed of cubes and was being asked simple questions, in simplistic vocabulary, dealing with that simplistic world. The problem is not the "coupling" of language with the model but the machine's inability to perform many kinds of reasoning required to perform tasks and furthermore to infere from the existing model components some other, not previously hard-coded, rules governing them. That is what is essential for any semblance of intelligence.
Otherwise your robot will attempt to stuff the fancy coffee maker you just bought your wife for Christmas into the trash because it was never programmed to recognize that shape and its nearest model is "useless trash object" coupled with routine "dispose of trash". Or wash the cat in a washing machine: "dirty fur". Essentially you are describing a mindless automaton, akin to the mechanical dolls of 18th century, only yours has a lot of cogs in it. Your "solution" to making it appear more intelligent is to make more cogs, forgetting completely that true intelligence is self-organizing.
I agree with you there. Not only is hard AI bullshit but even all the "connectionist" models proposed are seriously kooky. None of them addresses the issue of tight coupling between high level reasoning and extremely low level granularity of experience being fed into such system.
In other words, the language of the neural system is based on the indvidual pulses of the neurons and the language of consciousness is based on extremely high-level inductive operations and transformations, some of them associated with an abstraction framework called "language". That huge gap is what is thwarting the whole body of AI research for 5 decades now.
And before someone shouts "but computers are processing bits too", let me point out that in order to define a simplest of terms such as a "dot in my 3-dimentional visual field" requires massive pre-processing of rivers of visual data in order to formulate a 3-dimensional world model, infere from that model existence of individual "objects" called dots and then assign proper labeling to them. And that is just the absolutely pre-eliminary step to achieving serious natural language processing. Because otherwise when you say "a dot" to the computer, the machine can understand a sequence of letters "d", "o", "t", but not their "meaning" as people do, with all the implications of 3-dimensional geomerty which are implicitly embedded in such a simple term. Note that people who were born blind do have this capability but their internal models are based on other input channels such as touch and physical manipulation of 3-dimensional objects as well as thermal detecion of their proximity and similiar nuances.
Noone truly knows for sure (for such condition never arose) but if someone were to be born blind and deprived of all other sensory channels with the exception of speech and hearing (it would have to be restricted to spoken language only) odds are great that he/she would not be able to develop conscious thought. That is the situation the computers are in at the present. Their vision systems are totally de-coupled from the natural language processing sytems and this DARPA silliness makes it purposefully so.
And even if it didnt, noone has come up with any satisfactory method to even remotely bridge the gap.
Since noone on Earth (and I suspect this extends to the whole wide Universe) has even a tiniest of the most remote and foggiest ideas about what "your points" truly are, and much less as to how to go about "making them", I must humbly and respectfully decline this praise assigned so generously but prematurely, to me.
Sir, may I be the first one to tell you that you are an Awesomely Grand And Amazingly Unstable Libertarian Nut. You would be quite amusing but it appears that some of your hallucinations (they appear to you as "facts" such as 50% taxation accross the board in "most" developed nations) and "ideas" are being taken seriously by your fellow patients. Therefore I only ask you this: kindly take your delusions of government-less, market-is-divinely-infallable, dog-eat-dog, "freedom" society and try to make it work on an island, preferrably far away in the middle of an ocean so when the thing implodes explosively we wont get any half-eaten chunks of Libertarian Heros blowing our way. Thank you so very much in advance.
I do not wish to offend, but that is a cop-out. It is extremely unlikely that people not involved directly in the fray would be anywhere near as interested and passionate about it. That is like saying that China should have decided if the American British Colonies should be granted independence, since the opinions of the British, the Revolutionaries and some other Europeans were suspect because they all had a dog in the fight.
Rather then being a courtoom polemic, this is a battle and those who will muster better armies will win it, and "only" the future of humanity is at stake. You may wait for your impeccable impartial arbiter for a looooong time and when he comes, the dust will be long settled over the battlefield.
A message of "I surrender my utterly undefensible position but I can't think of a face-saving way to do it so I will just pretend my opponent is somehow illegitmate" received and accepted.
I wish you Good Luck and please do try to remember that some things which are widely accepted as "obvious" without any thought might actually be nothing of the kind and instead due to someone's usurping agenda and large propaganda budget. "Intellectual Property" is a shining example of this.
Dear me! That changes everything! You mean the elctromagnetic waves were actually ... oh my ... wait for it ... amplified in the receiver! And then, I am not sure if the terror of it will not kill me, someone dared to superimpose more waves encoding English text on top of existing ones!! Oh the horror!! And then in a fit of total devilry they let the amplified waves escape their equipment! And probably Satan himself, personally, transformed the waves into their numeric equivalent and stored them on a computer which allowed them to travel over another medium! Will the horrors never end!?
Just for curiosity sake, where in this process did the evil deed occur? At the point of internal amplification in the reciever? The amplified waves leaving it? Digitization? The numeric data leaving the computer? How is that different from the amplified analog waves leaving the receiver? If I were to provide means of supplying sub-titles independently so people can use their own receivers and superimpose them there, would I be doing equally evil deed? Are they all "thieves" then for receiving and amplifying the signal within their own receivers? Hmm? Sorry man, you cant get out of this jam no matter how you try.
grasp that very simple concept
Elecromagnetic radiation can be amplified and digitized with proper equipment. Yes it would seem rather simple, what was that you were saying?
In fact, it is so simple to grasp that one can only conclude that you are arguing this point only for the sake of trolling.
Careful here, I could accuse you of the same thing and I do have physics on my side!
Let me look into this in detail...
You said: By limiting access to something based on geographic location the copyright holder has effectively restricted the physical location.
From which I concluded that you consider a mere mental desire to limit access to be equal to physical restriction, since the only means at the disposal of Japanese TV is saying that they do not wish their transmissions to be picked up elsewhere. The electromagnetic radiation has the uncanny habit of not giving a flying fuck as to what self-righteous people want and just travels according to laws of physics. It even has the hutzpa to ignore their profit motive, why that ungrateful etheral bastard! And so I question you on this tidbit, and you respond with something to the effect of "You twisted my words!" Well then, please rephrase it in such a way that its meaning is unambiguous and do thwart my twisted ways, by all means!
P.S. I would like to point out to you that it is not my ability to twist things (although I am flattered that you think so highly of me) but the tangled web of illogic, which you began to weave as soon as you fell into the trap of trying to treat information as "private property" capable of being "stolen", which presents to me more and more opportunities to point out glaring absurdity as you struggle more and more desperately in its grip.
Fighting insane laws is a long process which begins with convincing people of their wrongness, this is where were at. You assumed that I actually do the copying habitually, which I do not. There is a difference betwen a moral and phillosophical stance and a desire to watch inane animations or imbecillic TV programs.
Perhaps the greed is in, "I didn't write the script, draw the pictures, or create the music, but I'm entitled to them anyway.?"
That has nothing to do with "entitlement" and everything to do with the nature of information. Since it is physically impossible to make information into "private property", from there it flows that it is also impossible to trade it in the same manner as you can trade pieces of coal. Thus instead of turning the argument on its head and speaking of "entiltement" we should be discussing how to make sure that true artists are able to express themselves and thus expand our civilization while they are provided with necessities of life and recognition they deserve.
Or maybe it's just delusions of grandeur, like, "Foo can't be owned. I'm entitled to foo because I could create foo just as well. Anyone can. I just don't happen to feel like it today."
Again you are trying to turn the core argument I am making into something it is not, as in "everyone can create art of equal caliber". I speak nothing of the kind, I am concerned exclusively with the unfitness of information to be "private property".
Whoa there! You mean to tell me that a building with doors, locks, guards built on a parcel of land into which your body must physically make a trip is the same as someone standing up and saying "You there! 2031 miles to the West! Behind that hill! Close your eyes or I will sue you!"
And you are calling me dellusional?
To explore this amusing insanity further, do you purport that the light particles bouncing off the stadium during a game are property of the NFL? To the end of time? What if I were to sit in a house I own next door with a telescope? In orbit? On Mars? Hmm?
In which case you do not have right to exist, since you just neatly defined the totality of our experiences as members of society. Everything related to civilization, starting at times immemorial, is like that. In fact we would not be here if it were the way you seem to think it should work because you will be still paying per-copy fee to the inventor of the "wheel" (he has absolute and never ending rights to his creation, which he passed onto his heirs, no?).
That is not the experience but the physical location that is restricted. Next.
VE3ECM for the rest of my life, as far as the callsign goes
Since you explained what it means, I concede that your personal info is known.
Cowardice is the main one.
I call it wisdom but you are welcome to your own definition.