What's the point of all this security really? I understand that with movies studios are afraid that there will be some miniscule, but real loss from commercial pirates. But what's the problem if the next Harry Potter book is leaked? It's not like someone is going to print a few millions copies and start competing with the legit publishers. There are no book pirates anymore.
And if someone wants to read a pirated ebook copy, he will. There isn't much social pressure to "read the book on the opening night", as with movies. I am perfectly willing to wait a few days for my copy of the next Harry Potter book. Especially, since the experience from the last year shows that the first OCR copy appears on the same day and a proofread one the day after that. I am not interested in buying, loaning or even printing a hard copy - I read all Harry Potter books on my Palm and I expect to do the same this time. What exactly does all that security achieve?
Sure, there are times when players just "go nuts", start messing around and go on random killing sprees, seeing how much carnage they can commit before being caught or killed - but if you persist, the consequences will always, always catch up with you.
Unless you have a tank.
Which, once again, conclusively proves - the one with the bigger stick makes the rules.
First, let me say upfront that I don't know anything about BBC coverage. I had to sit through half and hour of Euronews and learned more than I would ever want to know (which wasn't much, actually). May be BBC had, through the magic of public television, some great coverage of these incidents, though I doubt it. Most other channels certainly don't.
And my question was different. I didn't ask you whether you were informed about this via all available channels - I asked why does the media (and the government) want to literally soak you in the news about these incidents.
1) How interested are they? Is the interest greater than can be met with a 1-hour evening program and 2 or 3 brief updates during the day if anything significant happens? I would have understood it if there was anything even remotedly interesting shown, but why do people find non-informative non-news interesting? 2) Well, I appreciate the interest of Londoners. But why does everyone else care that much? Why is the information about the exact number of dead people relevant to anyone anywhere? This seems to be the key issue! All journalists constantly ask each other: "is there any new information on the number of victims?" It's as if that number might have some special significance - I don't know, may be if it's an even number, then the terrorists win or something. 3) Again, this may be somewhat important for the Brits, but if you consider the loss of human life, it's negligible. Why isn't there 24h coverage of road accidents? In 1996 3600 people died in road accidents in Britain, which appears to be about 70% of all such deaths in Europe (!) (BBC). That's about 10 people each day. So it's like a similar scale disaster happens every week. Where is the warranted coverage? 4) Obedient to authority, of course. If you are not given the important information, are not allowed to judge what is important by yourself and are constantly distracted with manufactured (or carefully chosen) news, you can't oppose the oppressive power. You are fed on a news diet that was carefully chosen to produce an obedient sheep. If you faithfully consume the media diet, you can't even think of anything that is outside the "sanctioned" news. That's mind control at its finest. It seems the paranoid nuts talking about mind control rays were up to something - after all, the electromagnetic radiation that carries TV is something eerily similar.
There is an interesting analogy. Let's consider Peter the Great, the greatest Russian emperor, who modernized and westernised the country in 18th century and is widely respected overall.
Under Peter the Great: under the threat of a fine, men were require NOT to wear beards, Western music and entertainment was ingrafted, noble women and men were required to wear western clothing, secular Western dancing was promoted and nobility was forced to attend Western balls, and so on. The Peter the Great's regime had total disregard for the heritage of Russia.
From my point of view, lack of freedom does not by itself mean that the situation is bad. For example, women in the USA (in most states) are required to cover their breasts and if they expose them in public, they are arrested for indecent exposure and fined. How is that qualitatively different from the Taliban regime?
You need to examine things in a broader context and pay special attention to the nature of the measures. The Afghan society of the 21st century is not a place where great personal liberties are expected and so the actions of Taliban are not very surprising or unusual. They are bad, however, but for an entirely different reason - because they lead to greater religious influence on society and not modernisation. But the same can be said about the United States - the same crimes are committed by the established order, although withing a different, more "liberal" Western framework.
He-he. The whole point of organising a medium-scale terrorist attack in your capital is to make people think irrationally. The constant barrage of "news" footage is supposed to create an irrational fear (as defined in psychology) of terroristm. Blinded by this fear people are supposed to accept everything they are told, even the obvious lies, such as "Saddam organised 9/11" and "British people need national ID cards in order to be safe".
I honestly don't believe it's my personal fault that there are countries that haven't kept pace with the prosperity of the Western world.
That's what every son and daughter of a drug lord or a mafia boss tells him/herself.
There are no countries that "haven't kept pace with the prosperity of the Western world". There are countries that were exploited by the Western world. The prosperity of the Western world is built on the blood and sweat of the world poor. And your high standard of living is being daily maintained by the exploitation of the world by Western corporations.
No matter what spin you put on it, you are immediately responsible for the suffering of the poor and daily deaths from hunger, unless you stop benefiting from the exploitation (that is, reduce your consumption and reduce a significant chunk of your income to the exploited countries in the form of contributions to charities).
Did anyone notice the eerie similarities between Blair's speeches and Bush's speeches 4 years ago? I think that by now any rational person should realise that we are being shamelessly manipulated by the establishment and the media and ignore these stories completely.
If you don't realise that, just ask yourself the simple question: Why is the media showing the so-called "news" from London almost non-stop (depending on the channel, it can probably amount to 50% of the airtime and even more)?
Again - why do they show so much of it? Think!
Possible answers: 1) People want gory entertainment and media provides it? Nope, there is no gore, just boring footage of London streets accompanies by sounds of sirens. 2) Everyone is genuinly concerned about people in London and media provides the information? Nope, there is no information to speak of (besides the sporadically updated bodycount and retelling of current rumours about latest gossip on why that happened). 3) This is an important even that warrants such coverage? Nope, this doesn't look even remotedly like it. A complete non-issue for almost everyone on this planet, except the victims and their friends and families. 4) The media is trying to manipulate us by turning us into a flock of obedient sheeps? If you chose this one, you are the winner.
Seriously, please mod all the "thoughts and prayers" morons down. They bother me.
I don't know about Azureus, but when I start BitComet, my Internet connection (256kbit) crawls to a standstill, regardless of how much BitComet is actually up/downloading. That means I can no longer comfortably browse the web.
If Opera could donwload the torrents without killing the Internet connection, I would happily use BitTorrent more.
One doesn't use WiFi to get kiddie porn. On the Internet the hoster is in a much greater danger than the user - same with mp3s, where uploading is prosecuted and downloading is simply frowned upon. If you host kiddie porn, it will be almost instantly deleted by the ISP and if you can be traced, Interpol may attempt to "get in touch" with you. If you download kiddie porn, nothing happens whatsoever. Unless, of course, you are investigated for real life child abuse and kiddie porn is found on your computer.
Nowdays most people interested in this kind of material use Freenet. It is rather safe (even though it's not bulletproof) and finding kiddie porn there takes may be 5 minutes.
First things first.:) You ask "Do we just proceed into the future without abandon or regulation?" Yes, by all means yes.
You point out porn and ads as if those were caused by Internet. Far from it - they are simply things that we humans wanted (or, in case of ads, corporations wanted) and that were made easier by the Internet. But when you present that as a problem somehow related to the Internet, you make a logical mistake. You presume that our ultimate goal is to prevent any and all bad things from happening and if we allow just one instance of something bad, we lost. You may not realise that, but this is the assumption behind your concerns.
Once you realise that we should not strive to eliminate all "bad things", but simple increase the human happiness overall, it becomes extremely easy to judge the Internet and nanotech. Will these technologies bring more good than bad? Is it possible to avoid the most horrible consequences? Then lets invent and adopt these amazing new technologies.
Nanotech and AI will be used for bad, but I believe that humanity will cope with it. Overall nanotech and AI will empower the people and this is a good thing. The society will evolve some defences and will prevent the biggest abuses. The minor problems will be dealt with after they happen. There are only two possible outcomes - we work everything out and these technologies do solve all our problems, or something goes terribly wrong and humanity goes extinct. Yes, the worst outcome is really bad, but we have no choice but to proceed. Without these advanced technologies we can't get immortality and omnipotence. And if we can't get that, what's the point?
In regards to your concern about sustainability, this is a totally bogus example too. When we have nanotech and AI, it will become trivial to produce everything a modern human needs using just solar (fusion) power and air (carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen). Nanoassemblers can produce almost everything we will need. Powerful computers will run virtual reality, where we will be able to get everything else. And AI will take care of running things.
Of course, this is a simplistic "proof-of-concept" model, but it is still useful. It shows that we should have little to no concerns about long-term sustainability, long-term climate changes and long-term ecological damage. Once we have advanced nanotech and AI, fixing these problems becomes trivial, almost like using a cheat code in a computer game.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't be worried about consequences. If possible, we need to proceed carefully and thoughtfully. But when the choice is between proceeding into the future with abandon and delaying or stopping the progress, I'd say that the promises of the progress are too great to stop or slow down.
It definitely is a hard problem. But most people don't even realise that such a problem exists. Kurzweil does what he can increasing the awareness of the problem. If enough people read his books, read articles on his site and listen to his speeches, may be there will be enough programmers, AI researchers, ethicists, etc. working on this to solve it.
You may think this is a foolish thing, but I suspect the truth is that you simply don't know much about the subject (i.e. the history of science and technology, the history of socio-economic changes, political economy, nanotech and AI, the underlying sciences, etc.). Instead of making rational conclusions (since you don't have a solid basis to start with) you rely on cliches that you were subjected to.
Your argument that "technology can't solve the world problems" is a result of the trust crisis that science faced in the second half of the 20th century, as a result of the irrational "nuclear fear" (which was itself a result of deliberate mind manipulation by the US government and media), the new knowledge about nature and ecology (which led to irrational environmentalism) and the assault of irrational and mystic beliefs imported from India and elsewhere. People were persuaded that science is dangerous and not very important (which frankly, isn't true) and taught not to trust it. There is no substance behind your argument. It should be ignored and you smacked hard for even bringing that up.
Anyway, since you asked, I will explain why you are indeed wrong. First, you do not make a distinction between "solving a problem" and "completely solving a problem". Throughout history technology solved a lot of problems and if we look at the big picture, it was most definitely the most important factor in solving the variety of problems that humanity faced. No other factor solved as many problems as science and technology did.
Second, are you claiming that someone promised that penicillin would solve all world's problems? I think you just invented a ridiculous lie that doesn't stand even the superficial scrutiny. Noone made such a claim. However, penicillin did in fact solve a very big problem, the problem of medicine being unable to treat bacterial infections at all. To me this is a great example of technology's ability to solve serious real world problems. If you believe that it's actually a counter-example to that - you are a moron (sorry, then). And don't bring up the resistance of mutant bacteria to antibiotics - it's not the fault of technology that it is unable to solve the problem completely, and it's not the fault of the scientists, since they never claimed it would.
Third, nanotechnology and AI are different from most older technologies in that they are, by nature, great equalisers (Internet is very similar in this regard) and that their very nature prevents strict control over their use and distribution. At a sufficiently advanced stage, nanoassemblers and nanoreplicators can be used to distribute the productive ability to every human on the planet. Similarly, copies of AI programs can be distributed to every human. There will be no logistical problems preventing the distributions, such as currently exist for distributing food and medicines to poor countries. There will be no ways to effectively control the distribution, as exist today for advanced technologies.
Fourth, of course, it won't be just the technologies that will spread themselves (though in the case of AI it can be) - it will most likely be people. But it's not hard to find a bunch of altruistic people that can break the barriers, laws and restrictions in order to facilitate free distribution of information (and both nanotech and AI are essentially information). We call them pirates and I have no doubt that there will be enormous prestige associated with releasing the plans for the first nanoassembler and the first human-level AI (unless we are lucky and the scientists who develop them will be able to release them by themselves without government or corporate restrictions).
Your reaction is easily explained by the fact that you didn't develop your beliefs yourself in a rational and logical way, but acquired them from TV, newspapers, snippets of radio, etc. When you make the effort to think independently, starting from the basics (that you can confirm using a textbook or a scientific paper), you should inevitably come to the same or similar conclusions as I described above.
The biggest problem today is not reaching the Singularity (it will happen, whether we want it or not) - it's doing it the right way. And in order to approach the Singularity from the best possible angle we need to think about it, we need to discuss it. So what Kurzweil's doing is actually rather important.
If you make the effort to think logically and rationally, you should realise that advanced nanotechnology and artificial intelligence will be unprecedented revolutionary breakthroughs. Whether or not these can be achieved in 30-50 years can be debated, but the informed consensus is that they can.
As for the millions of people dying from hunger and illnesses, this is the most unfortunate, but the beauty of nanotech and AI is that they can overcome the despotism and evilness of the modern western capitalism. If you think rationally and calmly, without dismissing these ideas outright, you should realise that 1) socio-political factors cause these unnecessary deaths and 2) nanotechnology and AI, once developed, can work on a large scale despite these factors.
This isn't hubris, this is simple rational thought. All that is necessary to understand the inevitability of this transcendence is to learn a lot about modern science and technology without succumbing to some dangerous memes (e.g. religion, mysticism, environmentalism, etc.) before. Once you have a decent understanding of genetics, neurophysiology, chemistry, physics and a few other areas, you can realise why nanotech and AI will happen relatively soon, why they are inevitable (unless something really bad happens) and why they will lead us into divinity.
Isn't that ironic that people are arguing over the exact and unchanging meaning of meme? Of course, the meaning changed -the old "catchy song" was not very useful and so not very fit. The more general "modern meme" mutation was much more successful for a variety of reasons, primarily because it's more useful. The idea of the meme itself is a meme and it changes to ensure its propagation in human culture.
The problem that still exists is that conventional "futurists" (they don't do futurology anymore, they do technology foresight) don't look farther than 2030 (in Japan). This is time where you can largely ignore the cumulative effect of technologies and concentrate on obvious and immediate implications. Kurzweil and other transhumanist thinkers concentrate on what happens in a slightly longer term - the technological singularity (2030-2050). But the first group largely ignores the inspired visions of the second group. And we don't have a coherent picture of how, for example, man and machine will merge. We can imagine the obvious stuff (that you can read in many tech stories), but it doesn't go very far. For example, we can envision bionic legs, but they are already here. We rarely talk seriously (outside of the science-fiction movies) about further developments. For example, people don't discuss seriously giving an artificial body to Stephen Hawkings (outsides of the realm of bad Slashdot jokes), even though it's almost inevitable, assuming he doesn't die very soon.
We still have major journals, such as Science, are glossing over the possibility^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hinevitability of immortality, arguing disingenuously that anti-ageing therapies will have "profound social effects... [such as] upsetting actuarial tables and retirement plans".
So in a sense we do have this agreement over the future. But in reality only a tiny minority of thinkers agree (or have the courage to speak openly about this future), the rest still entertain their delusional ideas that future is not a big deal.
Go read his site. Ascension and transcendence of humans is more important than OCR software for Linux. You are so terribly shortsighted that I pity you. How comes you have the wonderful Internet full of information in front of you and still you are clueless as a brick?
Lenin killed millions? If everyone in America is as ignorant as you are, no wonder you blame videogames. You don't know history and I suspect you don't know anything at all. And you still get modded up... Only on Slashdot.
Yeah but you can only do any of that once you've beaten the crap out of some poor civil service worker who was just trying to do their job.
Not true. You can pick up an empty service car. You can also hit the car, wait for the driver to get out, get in and drive away.
But seriously. GTA is about violence. Face it. We like killing things. Guns are fun! Acting out our fantasies in any way is usually fun. The point is maintaining the division between fantasy and reality which people these days are pretty crap at. For example, the male fantasy of women is percieved by women to be the ideal. Hence they end up with this stupid distorted fantasized body image.
I don't know... For me personally driving is more fun. May be it was different in older versions, but in San Andreas killing is boring. It's not a challenge, AI is dumb, everything is so repeatitive... I hope the NPCs in GTA4 will be more realistic. I want to kill realistic human, with realistic gore. I want them to behave like real humans, to beg for their lives, to act as real victims. And I want to kill pets and children too!:) Then killing will be fun again.
I guess we can all freely change the agenda and speakers order in a collaborative effort?
Just think how much more exciting and novel Slashdot would become if only we could edit each others' posts. Editing stories instead of reposting them would be another amazing improvement.
Yet supposedly the US government is suddenly going to do all sorts of nasty things with their control of the root servers.
It just may. I don't trust the US, I'd trust international organisations such as the UN much more.
I doubt Microsoft, IBM, General Motors, CitiBank, etc. would put up with that nor would any of the other many thousands of businesses and in short order, their money would do the talking to congressmen.
You're naive to think that General Motors or CitiBank would care about US government abuses, as long as they can do their business as usual.
My answer - there isn't anything, actually. Consider this: a human mind can probably be simulated using a sufficiently large Turing machine. This means that a human life can be represented rather accurately as a sequence of large memory states. After some thought experiments (read Permutation City for some of them) it is obvious that for all intents and purposes a real human life is indistinguishable (for the human in question) from a large sequence of large numbers. These can be combined into one single number. It should be obvious that subjectively there is no difference for anyone of us between existing as a real human being and as a large number. The benefit of being a number is that it doesn't even have to be written down anywhere. And the Universe is clearly superfluous.
So it is entirely possible that nothing exists and you only think that you do, because there could have been a number, which would be a representation of your life and your contemplation of your (non-)existence.
That's the reason to incorporate! Don't release software under your own name, register a company and let that company be the target of inevitable lawsuits.
Noone is talking about people suing Grokster developers, or KaZaA designers. It's always Sharman Networks or the Grokster company. It's not too late for Bram to stop all his involvement in BitTorrent as an independent individual. Let him be a programmer for Cohen, Inc.
I am not sure that indirect measurements, such as in this case, justify the conclusions made in the study. Actually, I am quite sure that they don't justify them at all. First, there is no cognitive science paper, book or lecture that I am aware of that ever claimed that there are distinct states (like on or off) in the mind. Of course, there aren't - we don't have separate timers (frquences) imposed on us, like modern CPUs do. So the press release is actually not talking about a computer, but rather about a single CPU. Yeah, our brain is not like a single computer chip. A great finding, thanks to the intrepid Cornell researchers.
Second, the "temporal resolution" is abysmal. No researcher has ever claimed that for "several dozen milliseconds" there is a single distinct mind state.
Third, their findings do not really disprove that there are distinct states, they just claim that there can be some more states between certain distinct states. So there can actually be a lot of states, so what? Neuron firing or not firing is as distinct as it gets. Before my spelling checker finally decides whether the word is cromulent or not, it is in the grey area too! If you could devise an experment to find out what Word 2000 think about a word in between me pressing space and there appearing (or not) a curved red underline, you would find that there is continuous competition too.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the point of all this security really? I understand that with movies studios are afraid that there will be some miniscule, but real loss from commercial pirates. But what's the problem if the next Harry Potter book is leaked? It's not like someone is going to print a few millions copies and start competing with the legit publishers. There are no book pirates anymore.
And if someone wants to read a pirated ebook copy, he will. There isn't much social pressure to "read the book on the opening night", as with movies. I am perfectly willing to wait a few days for my copy of the next Harry Potter book. Especially, since the experience from the last year shows that the first OCR copy appears on the same day and a proofread one the day after that. I am not interested in buying, loaning or even printing a hard copy - I read all Harry Potter books on my Palm and I expect to do the same this time. What exactly does all that security achieve?
Sure, there are times when players just "go nuts", start messing around and go on random killing sprees, seeing how much carnage they can commit before being caught or killed - but if you persist, the consequences will always, always catch up with you.
Unless you have a tank.
Which, once again, conclusively proves - the one with the bigger stick makes the rules.
First, let me say upfront that I don't know anything about BBC coverage. I had to sit through half and hour of Euronews and learned more than I would ever want to know (which wasn't much, actually). May be BBC had, through the magic of public television, some great coverage of these incidents, though I doubt it. Most other channels certainly don't.
And my question was different. I didn't ask you whether you were informed about this via all available channels - I asked why does the media (and the government) want to literally soak you in the news about these incidents.
1) How interested are they? Is the interest greater than can be met with a 1-hour evening program and 2 or 3 brief updates during the day if anything significant happens? I would have understood it if there was anything even remotedly interesting shown, but why do people find non-informative non-news interesting?
2) Well, I appreciate the interest of Londoners. But why does everyone else care that much? Why is the information about the exact number of dead people relevant to anyone anywhere? This seems to be the key issue! All journalists constantly ask each other: "is there any new information on the number of victims?" It's as if that number might have some special significance - I don't know, may be if it's an even number, then the terrorists win or something.
3) Again, this may be somewhat important for the Brits, but if you consider the loss of human life, it's negligible. Why isn't there 24h coverage of road accidents? In 1996 3600 people died in road accidents in Britain, which appears to be about 70% of all such deaths in Europe (!) (BBC). That's about 10 people each day. So it's like a similar scale disaster happens every week. Where is the warranted coverage?
4) Obedient to authority, of course. If you are not given the important information, are not allowed to judge what is important by yourself and are constantly distracted with manufactured (or carefully chosen) news, you can't oppose the oppressive power. You are fed on a news diet that was carefully chosen to produce an obedient sheep. If you faithfully consume the media diet, you can't even think of anything that is outside the "sanctioned" news. That's mind control at its finest. It seems the paranoid nuts talking about mind control rays were up to something - after all, the electromagnetic radiation that carries TV is something eerily similar.
There is an interesting analogy. Let's consider Peter the Great, the greatest Russian emperor, who modernized and westernised the country in 18th century and is widely respected overall.
Under Peter the Great: under the threat of a fine, men were require NOT to wear beards, Western music and entertainment was ingrafted, noble women and men were required to wear western clothing, secular Western dancing was promoted and nobility was forced to attend Western balls, and so on. The Peter the Great's regime had total disregard for the heritage of Russia.
From my point of view, lack of freedom does not by itself mean that the situation is bad. For example, women in the USA (in most states) are required to cover their breasts and if they expose them in public, they are arrested for indecent exposure and fined. How is that qualitatively different from the Taliban regime?
You need to examine things in a broader context and pay special attention to the nature of the measures. The Afghan society of the 21st century is not a place where great personal liberties are expected and so the actions of Taliban are not very surprising or unusual. They are bad, however, but for an entirely different reason - because they lead to greater religious influence on society and not modernisation. But the same can be said about the United States - the same crimes are committed by the established order, although withing a different, more "liberal" Western framework.
He-he. The whole point of organising a medium-scale terrorist attack in your capital is to make people think irrationally. The constant barrage of "news" footage is supposed to create an irrational fear (as defined in psychology) of terroristm. Blinded by this fear people are supposed to accept everything they are told, even the obvious lies, such as "Saddam organised 9/11" and "British people need national ID cards in order to be safe".
I honestly don't believe it's my personal fault that there are countries that haven't kept pace with the prosperity of the Western world.
That's what every son and daughter of a drug lord or a mafia boss tells him/herself.
There are no countries that "haven't kept pace with the prosperity of the Western world". There are countries that were exploited by the Western world. The prosperity of the Western world is built on the blood and sweat of the world poor. And your high standard of living is being daily maintained by the exploitation of the world by Western corporations.
No matter what spin you put on it, you are immediately responsible for the suffering of the poor and daily deaths from hunger, unless you stop benefiting from the exploitation (that is, reduce your consumption and reduce a significant chunk of your income to the exploited countries in the form of contributions to charities).
Did anyone notice the eerie similarities between Blair's speeches and Bush's speeches 4 years ago? I think that by now any rational person should realise that we are being shamelessly manipulated by the establishment and the media and ignore these stories completely.
If you don't realise that, just ask yourself the simple question: Why is the media showing the so-called "news" from London almost non-stop (depending on the channel, it can probably amount to 50% of the airtime and even more)?
Again - why do they show so much of it? Think!
Possible answers:
1) People want gory entertainment and media provides it? Nope, there is no gore, just boring footage of London streets accompanies by sounds of sirens.
2) Everyone is genuinly concerned about people in London and media provides the information? Nope, there is no information to speak of (besides the sporadically updated bodycount and retelling of current rumours about latest gossip on why that happened).
3) This is an important even that warrants such coverage? Nope, this doesn't look even remotedly like it. A complete non-issue for almost everyone on this planet, except the victims and their friends and families.
4) The media is trying to manipulate us by turning us into a flock of obedient sheeps? If you chose this one, you are the winner.
Seriously, please mod all the "thoughts and prayers" morons down. They bother me.
I'm one of those guys that thinks my http/https browser should used for http and https, you know, "the web".
And the images should be viewed using external plugins, right? Because adding jpeg decoding to the browser would be adding bloat. Right?
I don't know about Azureus, but when I start BitComet, my Internet connection (256kbit) crawls to a standstill, regardless of how much BitComet is actually up/downloading. That means I can no longer comfortably browse the web.
If Opera could donwload the torrents without killing the Internet connection, I would happily use BitTorrent more.
One doesn't use WiFi to get kiddie porn. On the Internet the hoster is in a much greater danger than the user - same with mp3s, where uploading is prosecuted and downloading is simply frowned upon. If you host kiddie porn, it will be almost instantly deleted by the ISP and if you can be traced, Interpol may attempt to "get in touch" with you. If you download kiddie porn, nothing happens whatsoever. Unless, of course, you are investigated for real life child abuse and kiddie porn is found on your computer.
Nowdays most people interested in this kind of material use Freenet. It is rather safe (even though it's not bulletproof) and finding kiddie porn there takes may be 5 minutes.
Now mod me down... or Informative.
First things first. :) You ask "Do we just proceed into the future without abandon or regulation?" Yes, by all means yes.
You point out porn and ads as if those were caused by Internet. Far from it - they are simply things that we humans wanted (or, in case of ads, corporations wanted) and that were made easier by the Internet. But when you present that as a problem somehow related to the Internet, you make a logical mistake. You presume that our ultimate goal is to prevent any and all bad things from happening and if we allow just one instance of something bad, we lost. You may not realise that, but this is the assumption behind your concerns.
Once you realise that we should not strive to eliminate all "bad things", but simple increase the human happiness overall, it becomes extremely easy to judge the Internet and nanotech. Will these technologies bring more good than bad? Is it possible to avoid the most horrible consequences? Then lets invent and adopt these amazing new technologies.
Nanotech and AI will be used for bad, but I believe that humanity will cope with it. Overall nanotech and AI will empower the people and this is a good thing. The society will evolve some defences and will prevent the biggest abuses. The minor problems will be dealt with after they happen. There are only two possible outcomes - we work everything out and these technologies do solve all our problems, or something goes terribly wrong and humanity goes extinct. Yes, the worst outcome is really bad, but we have no choice but to proceed. Without these advanced technologies we can't get immortality and omnipotence. And if we can't get that, what's the point?
In regards to your concern about sustainability, this is a totally bogus example too. When we have nanotech and AI, it will become trivial to produce everything a modern human needs using just solar (fusion) power and air (carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen). Nanoassemblers can produce almost everything we will need. Powerful computers will run virtual reality, where we will be able to get everything else. And AI will take care of running things.
Of course, this is a simplistic "proof-of-concept" model, but it is still useful. It shows that we should have little to no concerns about long-term sustainability, long-term climate changes and long-term ecological damage. Once we have advanced nanotech and AI, fixing these problems becomes trivial, almost like using a cheat code in a computer game.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't be worried about consequences. If possible, we need to proceed carefully and thoughtfully. But when the choice is between proceeding into the future with abandon and delaying or stopping the progress, I'd say that the promises of the progress are too great to stop or slow down.
It definitely is a hard problem. But most people don't even realise that such a problem exists. Kurzweil does what he can increasing the awareness of the problem. If enough people read his books, read articles on his site and listen to his speeches, may be there will be enough programmers, AI researchers, ethicists, etc. working on this to solve it.
You may think this is a foolish thing, but I suspect the truth is that you simply don't know much about the subject (i.e. the history of science and technology, the history of socio-economic changes, political economy, nanotech and AI, the underlying sciences, etc.). Instead of making rational conclusions (since you don't have a solid basis to start with) you rely on cliches that you were subjected to.
Your argument that "technology can't solve the world problems" is a result of the trust crisis that science faced in the second half of the 20th century, as a result of the irrational "nuclear fear" (which was itself a result of deliberate mind manipulation by the US government and media), the new knowledge about nature and ecology (which led to irrational environmentalism) and the assault of irrational and mystic beliefs imported from India and elsewhere. People were persuaded that science is dangerous and not very important (which frankly, isn't true) and taught not to trust it. There is no substance behind your argument. It should be ignored and you smacked hard for even bringing that up.
Anyway, since you asked, I will explain why you are indeed wrong. First, you do not make a distinction between "solving a problem" and "completely solving a problem". Throughout history technology solved a lot of problems and if we look at the big picture, it was most definitely the most important factor in solving the variety of problems that humanity faced. No other factor solved as many problems as science and technology did.
Second, are you claiming that someone promised that penicillin would solve all world's problems? I think you just invented a ridiculous lie that doesn't stand even the superficial scrutiny. Noone made such a claim. However, penicillin did in fact solve a very big problem, the problem of medicine being unable to treat bacterial infections at all. To me this is a great example of technology's ability to solve serious real world problems. If you believe that it's actually a counter-example to that - you are a moron (sorry, then). And don't bring up the resistance of mutant bacteria to antibiotics - it's not the fault of technology that it is unable to solve the problem completely, and it's not the fault of the scientists, since they never claimed it would.
Third, nanotechnology and AI are different from most older technologies in that they are, by nature, great equalisers (Internet is very similar in this regard) and that their very nature prevents strict control over their use and distribution. At a sufficiently advanced stage, nanoassemblers and nanoreplicators can be used to distribute the productive ability to every human on the planet. Similarly, copies of AI programs can be distributed to every human. There will be no logistical problems preventing the distributions, such as currently exist for distributing food and medicines to poor countries. There will be no ways to effectively control the distribution, as exist today for advanced technologies.
Fourth, of course, it won't be just the technologies that will spread themselves (though in the case of AI it can be) - it will most likely be people. But it's not hard to find a bunch of altruistic people that can break the barriers, laws and restrictions in order to facilitate free distribution of information (and both nanotech and AI are essentially information). We call them pirates and I have no doubt that there will be enormous prestige associated with releasing the plans for the first nanoassembler and the first human-level AI (unless we are lucky and the scientists who develop them will be able to release them by themselves without government or corporate restrictions).
Your reaction is easily explained by the fact that you didn't develop your beliefs yourself in a rational and logical way, but acquired them from TV, newspapers, snippets of radio, etc. When you make the effort to think independently, starting from the basics (that you can confirm using a textbook or a scientific paper), you should inevitably come to the same or similar conclusions as I described above.
The biggest problem today is not reaching the Singularity (it will happen, whether we want it or not) - it's doing it the right way. And in order to approach the Singularity from the best possible angle we need to think about it, we need to discuss it. So what Kurzweil's doing is actually rather important.
If you make the effort to think logically and rationally, you should realise that advanced nanotechnology and artificial intelligence will be unprecedented revolutionary breakthroughs. Whether or not these can be achieved in 30-50 years can be debated, but the informed consensus is that they can.
As for the millions of people dying from hunger and illnesses, this is the most unfortunate, but the beauty of nanotech and AI is that they can overcome the despotism and evilness of the modern western capitalism. If you think rationally and calmly, without dismissing these ideas outright, you should realise that 1) socio-political factors cause these unnecessary deaths and 2) nanotechnology and AI, once developed, can work on a large scale despite these factors.
This isn't hubris, this is simple rational thought. All that is necessary to understand the inevitability of this transcendence is to learn a lot about modern science and technology without succumbing to some dangerous memes (e.g. religion, mysticism, environmentalism, etc.) before. Once you have a decent understanding of genetics, neurophysiology, chemistry, physics and a few other areas, you can realise why nanotech and AI will happen relatively soon, why they are inevitable (unless something really bad happens) and why they will lead us into divinity.
Isn't that ironic that people are arguing over the exact and unchanging meaning of meme? Of course, the meaning changed -the old "catchy song" was not very useful and so not very fit. The more general "modern meme" mutation was much more successful for a variety of reasons, primarily because it's more useful. The idea of the meme itself is a meme and it changes to ensure its propagation in human culture.
The problem that still exists is that conventional "futurists" (they don't do futurology anymore, they do technology foresight) don't look farther than 2030 (in Japan). This is time where you can largely ignore the cumulative effect of technologies and concentrate on obvious and immediate implications. Kurzweil and other transhumanist thinkers concentrate on what happens in a slightly longer term - the technological singularity (2030-2050). But the first group largely ignores the inspired visions of the second group. And we don't have a coherent picture of how, for example, man and machine will merge. We can imagine the obvious stuff (that you can read in many tech stories), but it doesn't go very far. For example, we can envision bionic legs, but they are already here. We rarely talk seriously (outside of the science-fiction movies) about further developments. For example, people don't discuss seriously giving an artificial body to Stephen Hawkings (outsides of the realm of bad Slashdot jokes), even though it's almost inevitable, assuming he doesn't die very soon.
We still have major journals, such as Science, are glossing over the possibility^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hinevitability of immortality, arguing disingenuously that anti-ageing therapies will have "profound social effects... [such as] upsetting actuarial tables and retirement plans".
So in a sense we do have this agreement over the future. But in reality only a tiny minority of thinkers agree (or have the courage to speak openly about this future), the rest still entertain their delusional ideas that future is not a big deal.
Go read his site. Ascension and transcendence of humans is more important than OCR software for Linux. You are so terribly shortsighted that I pity you. How comes you have the wonderful Internet full of information in front of you and still you are clueless as a brick?
Lenin killed millions? If everyone in America is as ignorant as you are, no wonder you blame videogames. You don't know history and I suspect you don't know anything at all. And you still get modded up... Only on Slashdot.
Yeah but you can only do any of that once you've beaten the crap out of some poor civil service worker who was just trying to do their job.
:) Then killing will be fun again.
Not true. You can pick up an empty service car. You can also hit the car, wait for the driver to get out, get in and drive away.
But seriously. GTA is about violence. Face it. We like killing things. Guns are fun! Acting out our fantasies in any way is usually fun. The point is maintaining the division between fantasy and reality which people these days are pretty crap at. For example, the male fantasy of women is percieved by women to be the ideal. Hence they end up with this stupid distorted fantasized body image.
I don't know... For me personally driving is more fun. May be it was different in older versions, but in San Andreas killing is boring. It's not a challenge, AI is dumb, everything is so repeatitive... I hope the NPCs in GTA4 will be more realistic. I want to kill realistic human, with realistic gore. I want them to behave like real humans, to beg for their lives, to act as real victims. And I want to kill pets and children too!
Just think how much more exciting and novel Slashdot would become if only we could edit each others' posts. Editing stories instead of reposting them would be another amazing improvement.
Yet supposedly the US government is suddenly going to do all sorts of nasty things with their control of the root servers.
It just may. I don't trust the US, I'd trust international organisations such as the UN much more.
I doubt Microsoft, IBM, General Motors, CitiBank, etc. would put up with that nor would any of the other many thousands of businesses and in short order, their money would do the talking to congressmen.
You're naive to think that General Motors or CitiBank would care about US government abuses, as long as they can do their business as usual.
My answer - there isn't anything, actually. Consider this: a human mind can probably be simulated using a sufficiently large Turing machine. This means that a human life can be represented rather accurately as a sequence of large memory states. After some thought experiments (read Permutation City for some of them) it is obvious that for all intents and purposes a real human life is indistinguishable (for the human in question) from a large sequence of large numbers. These can be combined into one single number. It should be obvious that subjectively there is no difference for anyone of us between existing as a real human being and as a large number. The benefit of being a number is that it doesn't even have to be written down anywhere. And the Universe is clearly superfluous.
So it is entirely possible that nothing exists and you only think that you do, because there could have been a number, which would be a representation of your life and your contemplation of your (non-)existence.
That's the reason to incorporate! Don't release software under your own name, register a company and let that company be the target of inevitable lawsuits.
Noone is talking about people suing Grokster developers, or KaZaA designers. It's always Sharman Networks or the Grokster company. It's not too late for Bram to stop all his involvement in BitTorrent as an independent individual. Let him be a programmer for Cohen, Inc.
I am not sure that indirect measurements, such as in this case, justify the conclusions made in the study. Actually, I am quite sure that they don't justify them at all. First, there is no cognitive science paper, book or lecture that I am aware of that ever claimed that there are distinct states (like on or off) in the mind. Of course, there aren't - we don't have separate timers (frquences) imposed on us, like modern CPUs do. So the press release is actually not talking about a computer, but rather about a single CPU. Yeah, our brain is not like a single computer chip. A great finding, thanks to the intrepid Cornell researchers.
Second, the "temporal resolution" is abysmal. No researcher has ever claimed that for "several dozen milliseconds" there is a single distinct mind state.
Third, their findings do not really disprove that there are distinct states, they just claim that there can be some more states between certain distinct states. So there can actually be a lot of states, so what? Neuron firing or not firing is as distinct as it gets. Before my spelling checker finally decides whether the word is cromulent or not, it is in the grey area too! If you could devise an experment to find out what Word 2000 think about a word in between me pressing space and there appearing (or not) a curved red underline, you would find that there is continuous competition too.