Malware is one thing, but how often have competitors made this mistake when developing their products? Is it anti-competitive if Microsoft analyzes competing products that are accidentally sent to them during their development? Would it be practical as a form of corporate espionage?
Bacteria replicate without sex and they came first. Sex is just a protocol that evolved for sharing programming rather than accepting DNA packets from anywhere that could contain viruses.
Once you've got an AI that is "alive" and living in a world of finite resources, it's reproduction and development now become the domain of Darwinian evolution. Survival and replication forces efficiency, predator/prey/parasite relationships to emerge and limitations on what sort of new programming you accept from other individuals. A sufficiently advanced AI should be indistinguishable in behavior from a biological creature.
From a SETI perspective, the question is whether computers (whether they are sentient or not) will maintain their inorganic chemistry over the long run. If you are dependent on any finite mineral that is mined from any area of high concentration and poorly reclaimed at end-of-life, then eventually that mineral will no longer be available for new construction. Our civilization is in a window where we are creating new technologies that are able to exploit the existence of concentrations of rare elements in areas of the bedrock. Organic life works in the long run because it is composed entirely of materials that can be gathered from the environment around it. Even ignoring AI for a moment, after a million years of mining and economic growth, will we find ourselves back at technology that essentially purely organic with a few special-purpose inorganic elements like the iron in blood, simply because that's the only economical choice left.
I think the rebuttal is missing the forest for the trees. The question is whether there is a logical structure for "brain" that is simpler than the sum of all the chemistry required to implement it.
The entire code for a brain *IS* in the genome. Yes, the interactions are complex, but you don't have to exactly mimic every chemical interaction to create a logical structure that behaves in a similar way. However, I like to think of it as the the genome coding for a fractal attractor that will have to deal with a lot of random inputs rather than a traditional computer algorithm. Identical twins for example are different runs of the same code.
Now, talking about "human" brains is probably setting the goal posts in the wrong place. There is a huge brain-space out there to be explored. Look at the diversity of nervous systems across the animal kingdom - even within our own bodies there are nervous structures which are not directly connected with the "brain" which do some pretty amazing learning and information-processing. I do think genetics will be a guide to exploring the brainspace, but not a direct "let's see what happens if we tweak this base pair" sort of way.
Then again, what exactly are you expecting of a "human" brain? The conscious analytical part of our brain is a bit of a hack on top of a massive web of stimulus-response reactions, tides of emotion and flights of fancy over imagined mythologies. We can't even agree on where consciousness begins in the animal kingdom, so would we recognize it in a prototype machine? Even if you could take a perfect human brain template and plop it in a super computer with continuous inputs of data, it's not going to become "Spock's Brain" musing on the replacement of its limbs and organs, it's going to be like an infant born with extreme physical and hormonal deformities.
I'm one of those ex-mathamaticians who still sulks at the existence of discussions beyond my ability to comprehend, where there is absolutely nothing constructive I can add. As a student back in the day, I was always nervous of proofs that were longer than a page - it always seemed to me that once a single proof got beyond a certain length, there was always some lingering doubt that some flaw or special condition had been overlooked, doubt that would pass on to every result that then used it. I guess that's the difference between learning math (where the problems are deliberately selected by textbook authors to have nicely bounded complexity) and researching math (where nobody knows how many twists and turns there are in the road between you and your goal).
Aside from the security classification not having officially changed, you also don't want your troops getting into the habit of taking "leaks" off the Internet at face value. It may not be relevant to these documents, but there will come a day when deliberately altered documents are released (by friend or foe) as part of a propaganda campaign. Best to remind people not tasked with doing the analysis to stay away from the koolaid.
I'm not ready for this. I'm not convinced our social developement as a society is ready for this. But I agree that Facebook is just a little ahead of the curve - its the sort of profile that I sense will involuntarily be assembled by various monitoring groups from what data can be harvested ans assembled. Identities are already starting to crystallize - it feels like the Internet is going through a phase change akin to water going from liquid to solid.
The problem is that anti-social is a moving target and my experience has been that any monitoring bureaucracy, whether government or corporate, evolves over time to target the vulnerable groups (politically, economically, socially) that are least likely to fight back. They become tools of bullying rather than instruments of the common good.
I'm about as straight-and-narrow a person as you'll ever find, but I get claustrophobic in the presence of a police state mentality. I need my freedom. Without it, I lose ambition, lose imagination and become useless - to myself and to society. However, it will probably be easier to just label me anti-social than to accommodate me.
It is also worth remember that, while we didn't find any WMD, pretty near every country who investigated at the time, including US Democrats who voted to authorize the war, believed Saddam had WMD.
That's not quite my recollection. Most every country was confident that he didn't have them and saw through what the US was doing (there was a unprecedented open ovation in the security council to the French rebuttal to Colin Powell's "evidence"). But nevertheless, the UN faced a catastrophic crisis of credibility. If the US had gone to war without UN sanction, it would have been essentially the same situation as when Iraq invaded Kuwait - except with Iraq as the invaded instead of the invader. At that point, by all law and precident, if the US invaded Iraq, the rest of the world should have been required to unite to expel them by force. Obviously, the world was in no mood to wage war against the sole remaining superpower. So the UN, in an unwinnable position, did a diplomatic two-step to save what little face they could: they gave the US the token authority to do what they were going to do anyway.
Perhaps software marketing should take a page from the societies for animal welfare or "fair trade" logos and start promoting a sticker that certifies: "no overtime was used in the development of this product." I don't know if it would actually end up affecting my choice of product, but it would certainly be something I noticed.
Sorry, I assumed readers of my comment would make the leap to see that that once you start disregarding evidence because you think you are going to be lied to, the next logical step is to take the act of someone trying to speak to you at all as proof that you are right.
I mean, there is this big effort building laws and international standards surrounding and protecting the copyright on databases - perhaps the act of accumulating and correlating personal information in the first place needs to be examined and attached to the same infrastructure?
If you value privacy, then it seems to me that legal restrictions are the logical endgame - as more and more databases of aliases are interconnected and more of our lives moves to online services, living off the grid will be a full time career of paranoia.
I think, perhaps, the terrorists didn't forsee the real end-result of that terror.
Perhaps. But you have to remember that attacking the US was just a means to an end, not an end in itself. That brand of terrorism is aimed at provoking extreme reactions that alienate and radicalize people caught in the backlash. For the most part, I suspect they got *exactly* the response they wanted from the west.
Look at this way: the 9/11 attack was essentially the same idea as mask-clad people throwing stones from the middle of a protest rally in the hopes that police will charge the crowd and create a PR disaster - just on a much. much larger scale.
The rest of the world was getting earthquakes and I was beginning to feel left out. I can now say that I survived the world's strongest earthquake (of the day... so far...).
At first I thought a dump truck made a wrong turn onto my street. Then it sounded like the neighbor's washing machine was doing a cartoon-style sympathetic vibration. It lasted long enough that I got out of my chair and stood in a door frame and think about what I would do in a serious quake, but it was really a non-event - just a little jolt of adrenaline for my cat and myself on an otherwise lazy summer day. It's a little embarrassing to see it on slashdot's front page - I feel like I should at least have a bruise or a stubbed toe to report to justify the newsworthiness.
Does it seem to anyone else that the telegraph routinely confuses "Something up to size X could hypothetically happen some day" with "X IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN!!!!"?
I'm not saying this is a bad topic to have a conversation about (in fact it's one of my favorite disaster scenarios to rant about), it's just that if slashdot is going to reference the telegraph, it should frame it as though a new Hollywood disaster movie has been released, not as though it was an actual news item was printed.
Actually I do agree that a soup of bots gambling with each other does provide liquidity.
However, the system only provides profit to the money-makers if there is somehow a correlation between a stock being told today and a higher demand for it tomorrow. The bot market essentially manufactures a little bubble around each sale into the market between the time a seller appears and a buyer appears. This provides liquidity through fizz - every time the sellers actually outnumber buyers for any sustained period of time, you will get catastrophic crashes instead of just a drop in prices.
hmmm, relativistic freefall does satify the crazy speed loophole of my critique... I could salvage my argument if I could somehow start from rest close enough to the event horizon so that freefall hadn't yet reached relativistic speeds upon reaching the event horizon. But I guess there's no possible trajectory that would let me reach that state without enough deceleration to turn me into a puddle of goo?
(disclaimer: I acknowledge that my layman's intuition about physics is probably not terribly applicable to relativistic freefalls into black holes)
But for a large black hole, in theory, you could cross the event horizon without being ripped apart.
I have a hard time believing there is any scenario where you can just cruise into a black hole. If you're standing waste-deep in a black hole, the blood in your toes, inside the event horizon, is never allowed to reach your heart which sits outside of it. So even if a frame of reference exists that doesn't rip you apart, it would have to be falling into the black hole fast enough to cross the event horizon in a heartbeat.
(if you take this same thought experiment all the way down to the size and speed of the motions of individual atoms, it seems to me that what happens at the event horizon has to be very fast or very messy)
I agree. What google news, by its aggregation, so eloquently proves is that 99% of the "top stories" content out there is completely redundant - most papers provide just a token tweaking of a newswire story. We don't need a hundred versions of that. I think a more serious threat than google is wikinews - the sum of many writers, combined with clear citations linked to the story and an edit history is already becoming my first choice of where to look on complex issues where I want the facts and current situation.
If you can't see that it is the same concept, then the conversation needs to continue. Property lines are an arbitrary invention of society restricting freedom of snooping - the same framework of norms and expectations we apply to geography can be applied to any terrain/medium, including airwaves.
Why stop at walkie-talkies? Logically, there is some form of microphone/amplifier/signal-processing which can detect any word spoken, even if you are in a tinfoil vault in your basement.
If your door isn't secure against my axe, is it still wrong for me to go into your house?
But what definition of species does this estimate use? It may seem odd, but there really isn't a scientific consensus of how to define a "species". That's not to say there aren't strong opinions out there, but it tends to vary from field to field depending on what questions a particular group of biologists is trying to answer. When you actually dig down and look carefully, there are shades of gray and blurring of lines all over the place (as would be expected for a world that is constantly evolving - there's no clear day on which one species becomes two).
(If you're trying to count species from the point of view of a billionaire with a Pokemon mindset, you're going to be disappointed because there will never have a perfect checklist for you to collect)
They can sell information on everyone you called, use speech recognition to monetize the content of your calls. And since you voluntarily brought a phone into your life, why turn off the microphone just because you aren't making a call? Just continuously record everything in the vicinity - there must be a wealth of data there that someone would pay for.
If data-mining of everything that touches the service works for facebook, why not telcos?
If you lived on tropical shore where the climate was practically unchanging from day to day throughout the year, it would probably be hard to imagine life could exist in Canada.
Slashdot Mirror
Malware is one thing, but how often have competitors made this mistake when developing their products? Is it anti-competitive if Microsoft analyzes competing products that are accidentally sent to them during their development? Would it be practical as a form of corporate espionage?
Bacteria replicate without sex and they came first. Sex is just a protocol that evolved for sharing programming rather than accepting DNA packets from anywhere that could contain viruses.
Once you've got an AI that is "alive" and living in a world of finite resources, it's reproduction and development now become the domain of Darwinian evolution. Survival and replication forces efficiency, predator/prey/parasite relationships to emerge and limitations on what sort of new programming you accept from other individuals. A sufficiently advanced AI should be indistinguishable in behavior from a biological creature.
From a SETI perspective, the question is whether computers (whether they are sentient or not) will maintain their inorganic chemistry over the long run. If you are dependent on any finite mineral that is mined from any area of high concentration and poorly reclaimed at end-of-life, then eventually that mineral will no longer be available for new construction. Our civilization is in a window where we are creating new technologies that are able to exploit the existence of concentrations of rare elements in areas of the bedrock. Organic life works in the long run because it is composed entirely of materials that can be gathered from the environment around it. Even ignoring AI for a moment, after a million years of mining and economic growth, will we find ourselves back at technology that essentially purely organic with a few special-purpose inorganic elements like the iron in blood, simply because that's the only economical choice left.
I think the rebuttal is missing the forest for the trees. The question is whether there is a logical structure for "brain" that is simpler than the sum of all the chemistry required to implement it.
The entire code for a brain *IS* in the genome. Yes, the interactions are complex, but you don't have to exactly mimic every chemical interaction to create a logical structure that behaves in a similar way. However, I like to think of it as the the genome coding for a fractal attractor that will have to deal with a lot of random inputs rather than a traditional computer algorithm. Identical twins for example are different runs of the same code.
Now, talking about "human" brains is probably setting the goal posts in the wrong place. There is a huge brain-space out there to be explored. Look at the diversity of nervous systems across the animal kingdom - even within our own bodies there are nervous structures which are not directly connected with the "brain" which do some pretty amazing learning and information-processing. I do think genetics will be a guide to exploring the brainspace, but not a direct "let's see what happens if we tweak this base pair" sort of way.
Then again, what exactly are you expecting of a "human" brain? The conscious analytical part of our brain is a bit of a hack on top of a massive web of stimulus-response reactions, tides of emotion and flights of fancy over imagined mythologies. We can't even agree on where consciousness begins in the animal kingdom, so would we recognize it in a prototype machine? Even if you could take a perfect human brain template and plop it in a super computer with continuous inputs of data, it's not going to become "Spock's Brain" musing on the replacement of its limbs and organs, it's going to be like an infant born with extreme physical and hormonal deformities.
Can the proof be verified in polynomial time?
I'm one of those ex-mathamaticians who still sulks at the existence of discussions beyond my ability to comprehend, where there is absolutely nothing constructive I can add. As a student back in the day, I was always nervous of proofs that were longer than a page - it always seemed to me that once a single proof got beyond a certain length, there was always some lingering doubt that some flaw or special condition had been overlooked, doubt that would pass on to every result that then used it. I guess that's the difference between learning math (where the problems are deliberately selected by textbook authors to have nicely bounded complexity) and researching math (where nobody knows how many twists and turns there are in the road between you and your goal).
Aside from the security classification not having officially changed, you also don't want your troops getting into the habit of taking "leaks" off the Internet at face value. It may not be relevant to these documents, but there will come a day when deliberately altered documents are released (by friend or foe) as part of a propaganda campaign. Best to remind people not tasked with doing the analysis to stay away from the koolaid.
I'm not ready for this. I'm not convinced our social developement as a society is ready for this. But I agree that Facebook is just a little ahead of the curve - its the sort of profile that I sense will involuntarily be assembled by various monitoring groups from what data can be harvested ans assembled. Identities are already starting to crystallize - it feels like the Internet is going through a phase change akin to water going from liquid to solid.
The problem is that anti-social is a moving target and my experience has been that any monitoring bureaucracy, whether government or corporate, evolves over time to target the vulnerable groups (politically, economically, socially) that are least likely to fight back. They become tools of bullying rather than instruments of the common good.
I'm about as straight-and-narrow a person as you'll ever find, but I get claustrophobic in the presence of a police state mentality. I need my freedom. Without it, I lose ambition, lose imagination and become useless - to myself and to society. However, it will probably be easier to just label me anti-social than to accommodate me.
It is also worth remember that, while we didn't find any WMD, pretty near every country who investigated at the time, including US Democrats who voted to authorize the war, believed Saddam had WMD.
That's not quite my recollection. Most every country was confident that he didn't have them and saw through what the US was doing (there was a unprecedented open ovation in the security council to the French rebuttal to Colin Powell's "evidence"). But nevertheless, the UN faced a catastrophic crisis of credibility. If the US had gone to war without UN sanction, it would have been essentially the same situation as when Iraq invaded Kuwait - except with Iraq as the invaded instead of the invader. At that point, by all law and precident, if the US invaded Iraq, the rest of the world should have been required to unite to expel them by force. Obviously, the world was in no mood to wage war against the sole remaining superpower. So the UN, in an unwinnable position, did a diplomatic two-step to save what little face they could: they gave the US the token authority to do what they were going to do anyway.
The UN appeased the US.
Perhaps software marketing should take a page from the societies for animal welfare or "fair trade" logos and start promoting a sticker that certifies: "no overtime was used in the development of this product." I don't know if it would actually end up affecting my choice of product, but it would certainly be something I noticed.
Sorry, I assumed readers of my comment would make the leap to see that that once you start disregarding evidence because you think you are going to be lied to, the next logical step is to take the act of someone trying to speak to you at all as proof that you are right.
Should datamining be a criminal offense?
I mean, there is this big effort building laws and international standards surrounding and protecting the copyright on databases - perhaps the act of accumulating and correlating personal information in the first place needs to be examined and attached to the same infrastructure?
If you value privacy, then it seems to me that legal restrictions are the logical endgame - as more and more databases of aliases are interconnected and more of our lives moves to online services, living off the grid will be a full time career of paranoia.
Just food for thought.
Or seen from the other side ...
First they fight you
Then they ridicule you
Then they ignore you
Then you lose.
I think, perhaps, the terrorists didn't forsee the real end-result of that terror.
Perhaps. But you have to remember that attacking the US was just a means to an end, not an end in itself. That brand of terrorism is aimed at provoking extreme reactions that alienate and radicalize people caught in the backlash. For the most part, I suspect they got *exactly* the response they wanted from the west.
Look at this way: the 9/11 attack was essentially the same idea as mask-clad people throwing stones from the middle of a protest rally in the hopes that police will charge the crowd and create a PR disaster - just on a much. much larger scale.
I'd be very surprised if you can spend a billion dollars on security for a weekend summit without funding some data mining of chatter.
The rest of the world was getting earthquakes and I was beginning to feel left out. I can now say that I survived the world's strongest earthquake (of the day ... so far ...).
At first I thought a dump truck made a wrong turn onto my street. Then it sounded like the neighbor's washing machine was doing a cartoon-style sympathetic vibration. It lasted long enough that I got out of my chair and stood in a door frame and think about what I would do in a serious quake, but it was really a non-event - just a little jolt of adrenaline for my cat and myself on an otherwise lazy summer day. It's a little embarrassing to see it on slashdot's front page - I feel like I should at least have a bruise or a stubbed toe to report to justify the newsworthiness.
Does it seem to anyone else that the telegraph routinely confuses "Something up to size X could hypothetically happen some day" with "X IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN!!!!"?
I'm not saying this is a bad topic to have a conversation about (in fact it's one of my favorite disaster scenarios to rant about), it's just that if slashdot is going to reference the telegraph, it should frame it as though a new Hollywood disaster movie has been released, not as though it was an actual news item was printed.
Actually I do agree that a soup of bots gambling with each other does provide liquidity.
However, the system only provides profit to the money-makers if there is somehow a correlation between a stock being told today and a higher demand for it tomorrow. The bot market essentially manufactures a little bubble around each sale into the market between the time a seller appears and a buyer appears. This provides liquidity through fizz - every time the sellers actually outnumber buyers for any sustained period of time, you will get catastrophic crashes instead of just a drop in prices.
hmmm, relativistic freefall does satify the crazy speed loophole of my critique ... I could salvage my argument if I could somehow start from rest close enough to the event horizon so that freefall hadn't yet reached relativistic speeds upon reaching the event horizon. But I guess there's no possible trajectory that would let me reach that state without enough deceleration to turn me into a puddle of goo?
(disclaimer: I acknowledge that my layman's intuition about physics is probably not terribly applicable to relativistic freefalls into black holes)
But for a large black hole, in theory, you could cross the event horizon without being ripped apart.
I have a hard time believing there is any scenario where you can just cruise into a black hole. If you're standing waste-deep in a black hole, the blood in your toes, inside the event horizon, is never allowed to reach your heart which sits outside of it. So even if a frame of reference exists that doesn't rip you apart, it would have to be falling into the black hole fast enough to cross the event horizon in a heartbeat.
(if you take this same thought experiment all the way down to the size and speed of the motions of individual atoms, it seems to me that what happens at the event horizon has to be very fast or very messy)
I agree. What google news, by its aggregation, so eloquently proves is that 99% of the "top stories" content out there is completely redundant - most papers provide just a token tweaking of a newswire story. We don't need a hundred versions of that. I think a more serious threat than google is wikinews - the sum of many writers, combined with clear citations linked to the story and an edit history is already becoming my first choice of where to look on complex issues where I want the facts and current situation.
If you can't see that it is the same concept, then the conversation needs to continue. Property lines are an arbitrary invention of society restricting freedom of snooping - the same framework of norms and expectations we apply to geography can be applied to any terrain/medium, including airwaves.
Why stop at walkie-talkies? Logically, there is some form of microphone/amplifier/signal-processing which can detect any word spoken, even if you are in a tinfoil vault in your basement.
If your door isn't secure against my axe, is it still wrong for me to go into your house?
But what definition of species does this estimate use? It may seem odd, but there really isn't a scientific consensus of how to define a "species". That's not to say there aren't strong opinions out there, but it tends to vary from field to field depending on what questions a particular group of biologists is trying to answer. When you actually dig down and look carefully, there are shades of gray and blurring of lines all over the place (as would be expected for a world that is constantly evolving - there's no clear day on which one species becomes two).
(If you're trying to count species from the point of view of a billionaire with a Pokemon mindset, you're going to be disappointed because there will never have a perfect checklist for you to collect)
We finally understood the universe, so it has been replaced with something even more perplexing.
They can sell information on everyone you called, use speech recognition to monetize the content of your calls. And since you voluntarily brought a phone into your life, why turn off the microphone just because you aren't making a call? Just continuously record everything in the vicinity - there must be a wealth of data there that someone would pay for.
If data-mining of everything that touches the service works for facebook, why not telcos?
If you lived on tropical shore where the climate was practically unchanging from day to day throughout the year, it would probably be hard to imagine life could exist in Canada.