You're that into fat beardly dudes? Sorry to let you down, AC, but I'm pretty sure I swing for the other team. Yeah, I really wasn't thinking about the potential gender implications of my username (it's a lame joke based on SI prefixes that I tossed out on the spur of the moment when signing up for a Slashdot account). I am rarely mistaken for female in real life --- but it has been educational to see what sort of slimeballs a gender-ambiguous internet identity will lure out of the woodwork.
As a male, I guess I should be proud to have achieved cunt status. If people like you vigorously hate me, I must be doing something right to piss off the scumbags in this world. Anyway, part of not being a fucking bigot is listening to women's voices on issues of discrimination. No matter how many angry men insist to me that women have reached full equality, it's really not a convincing argument compared to the dissenting accounts I hear from *women* I know. Guess what: your exclusively male view of the world may not be the final word on correctness. Rather than discount women's voices in assessing the state of gender equality, I'm willing to give them a lot more credibility than the room full of males insisting they'd never be sexist (unless the "bigoted feminazi cunt" deserved it).
what they're proposing is NOT a blind-to-gender society.
What many feminists are proposing is a not blind to existing gender inequalities and their sources society. Anti-feminists like to spread intentional confusion between wanting a gender-blind society and being blind to gender discrimination --- "you can't call out anyone for being misogynistic, because that proves you can still tell which victims of discrimination are female!"
Your feminist argument is 'men and women should be equal except women should be superior'.
And how did your amazing critical reading skills reach that conclusion, which has nothing to do with what I said?
You seem to have missed a big part of my argument, which is that *situations change with time,* so *particular things that wouldn't be necessary in the ideal future case of equality might be necessary while reacting to existing inequality.*
Suppose you see a dozen people locked up in chains. You think "in an ideal world, no one would be locked up in chains --- ergo, there would be no need to free anyone from chains". Are you a hypocrite for expending effort to cut through their chains (and even calling on others to help), because you said that in an ideal world no one would need to be freed from chains?
So exactly what part of bleeping out a word or phrase isn't "preventing others from speaking" that word or phrase?
If the reporter decided not to replay any of the bigot's speech at all on the evening news, would you say that they were censoring even more? Are they also censoring every other single person whose speech they don't replay? How do you separate "preventing others from speaking" from "not repeating what others are speaking," or "only repeating excerpts from what people are speaking, interspersed with monotonic musical interludes"? I think a concept of "censorship" in terms of "information filtering" is more generally applicable, and avoids all sorts of tricky ambiguities about what is and isn't "preventing others from speaking," especially where it's not clear they'd be able to speak in the first place (you might not assume that this bigot would, by default, get a speaking spot on the evening news).
By your argument if you had someone who was censored, you could argue that failing to stop them from speaking to the guy behind the counter at the 7-Eleven would mean that they hadn't been censored because you didn't stop all of their speech.
Yes, I would say that the intended/attempted censorship failed in the case of the words they managed to get across before being silenced. Similarly, if you shot at someone and missed (or gave them a little flesh wound), that would be *attempted* murder, not murder, and I wouldn't say the survivor of the attempt had been murdered.
Sorry, based on your post above, I thought this was the thread for wildly loose analogies. And where, in my post above, was I breaking any rules/laws? Corporations are trying to redefine how the web works, in order to establish a new "social contract" for commerce that doesn't work like the traditional "I give you money for stuff, then use stuff as I want." If you want to sell your content on the internet, then *sell your content on the internet*: take payment for it before letting it go out *your* door.
Here's perhaps a more careful analogy for how the internet works: I never enter your store. You have a storefront with a walk-up window (and maybe a big sign saying "Welcome! Free groceries!"). Anyone can send their browser agent to walk up and say "Hey! give me a rutabaga!" or likewise. It's your choice how to respond --- you can ignore them; you can tell them "we don't have rutabagas"; you can say "rutabagas are for paying customers only, please hand over your credit card first"; you can hand them a pile of cat photos; you can give them a rutabaga; you can give them a rutabaga with a religious tract stapled to the side. But whatever you hand over to them is now *theirs* to do with as they want. Scream all you want: "hey, no fair throwing the religious tract away before taking the rutabaga back to your master!", but my browser is OK to ignore you.
Corporations want to redefine how law works on the internet, such that by printing "by taking a rutabaga, you agree to read this religious tract" on the religious tract they hand out with the rutabaga, I am morally and/or legally bound to do so. But this is complete rubbish, and I utterly reject it. I block ads on websites. I never signed a contract with them saying "I will watch your ads." I sent my browser to their storefront, and they willingly handed over an ad-laden rutabaga, knowing that I had never agreed to their terms. If you don't like people stripping away your ads, then *don't hand out (ad-laden) content to any anonymous stranger who walks up and asks for it*. It's *your* responsibility to create a valid pre-existing contract with people viewing your content, and restrict who you hand out content to.
Yaknow, centuries of deeply entrenched stereotypes don't magically vanish away overnight. Lifting up counter-examples to the stereotype that women just aren't mentally cut out for logical/intellectual work is important to eradicating such views. Other young women should get the chance to see female role models praised in the media for accomplishments besides being Miss Teen America 2013. While an ultimate goal is reaching a society where it's nothing special for a woman to be a programmer, to *get there* from our present sexist world, one needs to actively push back against entrenched misogyny.
Your simplistic definition of censorship ("not preventing others from speaking") doesn't hold up. Suppose a xenophobic bigot is speaking on a public corner. If a news reporter records him, and plays his speech on the evening news with some of the most vile racial slurs bleeped out, then they're censoring his speech --- without stopping him from speaking; in fact, giving him a bigger audience for the non-censored parts. Censorship is filtering out material according to one's own preferences. Preventing others from speaking is one (especially vile) form of censorship: shooting the bigot for speaking would indeed filter out his material. So would standing next to him on the corner and blasting an air horn to bleep out some of his words --- which might even count as protected free expression of your own. I think censorship is a more ethically complex and nuanced issue that you imply; and covers a range of behaviors which aren't all inimical to a free society (such as applying censorship to material you choose to view for yourself).
So no one will notice systematic discrimination, which allows sexism to be a deeply rooted controlling factor for real-world systems so long as it's not too blatantly stated in writing?
In a sense it is: but you are applying the censorship only to what you see/hear. I think people should be permitted to self-censor. If I want to filter my view of the world to block out ********, then I should be able to do that. If I want to write a ********-filter plugin to help other people choose to avoid wasting their time on ******** too, then that's fine. The problem is when I impose censorship on others: if I'm the manager at the local telco monopoly, I shouldn't be installing network filters to keep ******** off my customers' computers (if they want to do so themselves, fine).
I know the temptation! However, the "being exactly like me is the gold standard for sentience" line of thinking is what gives people ideas like "the Negro race is clearly sub-human; we do them a great favor by ennobling them from useless savages into productive slaves." While an *easy* answer to the question of sentience, "be like me!" might not be a particularly good method for evaluating physically non-human sentience, given how poorly humanity has done at recognizing even fellow human sentience.
Suppose a grocery store had their door wide open, and a big banner out front:
"Come in! Take what you want! It's all FREE!**"
** produce may contain venomous mind-altering spiders that will turn you into an obedient zombie slave.
So now, I put on my spider-proof suit before entering the store, and when I get home, I rinse all the produce in boiling acid to kill off the spiders. When the grocery store manager calls me up to say "Hey, asshole, we make all our money off reselling zombie slaves! How do you expect us to give you free groceries, if you protect yourself from the spiders?," I'm not gonna be particularly receptive to his arguments.
You missed the point that not all grants are tax-funded. Corporations also provide grants to do research, as do private foundations.
(a) what fraction is this in most fields? In particle physics (my own area), I've never seen any privately funded research --- but we're stuck with Elsevier journals. (b) regardless, why should private grants paying extra for Elsevier's profits be any better? Wouldn't a private granter be happier paying less for non-profit journal systems, too?
Except there is no newspaper. There's a monthly magazine.
OK; you don't see the value in professional organizations. Others do --- including value beyond delivering magazines to our door, such as organizing conferences, scholarships, promoting research, even *providing journals better for the progress of science than profiteering schmucks.*
That's how capitalism works. People who risk money get to profit when the risk pays off.
And, when you lock in a monopoly position (such as is granted through exclusive intellectual property rights to journal articles), you can hoover up mega profits! Some of us don't think Capitalism is a good idea even in the *best* of cases, but this is the very *worst* of Capitalism --- the hideous face of monopolistic moneygrubbing.
The "extortion" fees are because they are making it more convenient for you to get the information, a service which costs real money.
Elsevier's profit margins are *absolute proof* that these services could be provided for at least 30% lower cost. With charges that range into hundreds of thousands of dollars per year per institution for hosting a few tens of thousands of PDF pages of archive material, do you seriously think this couldn't be done ***way*** cheaper (such as at the rates consistently provided by non-profit journals, which are often ~10% of Elsevier's fees for similar services)?
Your tests appear to be strongly centered on a specifically "human-centric" --- and even distinctly culturally biased --- definition of "self awareness." If you just want to test that someone is human, you can have them come in for blood tests and an MRI. Perhaps your "self-awareness" test is too narrow --- I think even a lot of humans would fail --- to be sensible for evaluating "sentience" in non-human beings? Let's consider some of the particular points of your test; keeping in mind how a "machine impostor" with, e.g., the capabilities of IBM's "Watson," a "normal" human, or an "intelligent alien" might fare:
Expression of preferences
itself pretty easy to "fake" --- the "machine impostor" just needs a way to assign "preference" scores to nouns. Easy example: rate things by how popular they are on Google. An "I love it because it's most popular" teenager might be shallow, but are they non-sentient?
...explain their judgements opinions biases, and reasons for their decisions in writings
So, sentient life needs to know how to write? And even a human's reasons for preferences are well-thought-out and logically arguable? Or would a "machine impostor" programmed to answer "all my friends like it," or "I don't know... I just smile inside thinking of it" pass?
rank arguments according to how persuasive it was, how natural the argument was, and to what extent the arguments are emotionally persuasive.
So the 90% of humans who have pretty abysmal writing/argumentation skills would fail? And, for "explaining" preferences, a pretty limited number of "canned" fill-in-the-blanks approaches would work for a "computer impostor" --- even a "justification" for an "I like what's popular" ranking.
the subject has to read a paper...
So, sentient life needs to be able to read (in what language??)
social skills in a chat simulation.
I know quite a few people who would be terrible at this. Again, there is a strong assumption of shared language --- I'd fare worse than the dumbest chat bot in a Chinese chat room.
for example, campaigning to be elected for a virtual office, writing political speeches, and employing bargaining techniques and other methods, to persuade a sufficient number, to cast their vote in favor of the test subject.
Holy cultural specificity! Given the range of persuasive/political/bargaining techniques used for different audiences, what might be most persuasive to one group is the exact opposite to another --- when I listen to popular right-wing US politicians, the only thing I come away convinced of is "wow, they really shouldn't be anywhere near public office."
after having thoroughly expressed their preferences, are presented with a series of dilemmas... which principle or preference, moral, or value they choose to sacrifice in a situation
How many humans have coherent, well-thought-out moral systems? Something deep enough to pose dilemmas, that can't be "resolved" by just picking an arbitrary outcome and "justifying" it with "whoa, that's hard, I don't know? I guess just do the first option?
demonstration of ability to select and make appropriate sacrifices when called for, ability to decide to self-sacrifice
I don't personally hold a high opinion of Ayn Rand's disciples, but is a selfish person non-sentient?
and the ability to defy the letter of the rules, when necessary
again, is a legalistic "rule of law above all; I trust my superiors" type non-sentient, even if they are a menace to humanity?
Your test is strongly skewed towards identifying "sentience" with a highly literate, culturally-specific type of human. Pretty much all your tests are useless for a sentient being that doesn't read/write whatever language
A free space electron-positron annihilation will release two 511keV gammas, but a hole in an electron valence band in a semiconductor can annihilate with a conduction band electron with considerably less energy release.
Yes, I know Asimov wasn't trying to accurately describe a real technology when coining the term "positronic brain," and wouldn't have been considering solid state electronics design in the 1940s.
And this is a major reason why profiling results in complete failure: if having DARE stickers on a car reduces chances of being pulled over, then drug runners will slap DARE stickers (and maybe a "Friends of $CITY Police Department fundraiser campaign 2013" decal for good measure) all over their smuggling cars.
On the contrary, I'd say the posting style significantly speeds up parsing, by encouraging people to entirely skip over the content past the first few words --- and nothing of value is lost.
You can hook up a hardware random noise generator to a computer --- that relies on "physical" noise processes which are as random as anything else we know in the universe. So yes, you can have "random numbers" in computer science --- even if not generated by an algorithm --- but as a mathematical ideal against which to compare pseudo-random generators, or the result of a "true" hardware random source. So, one can build a robot that won't necessarily act deterministically; even one that incorporates results from previous actions into its state ("memory") to create different reactions to future applications of the same stimuli. Does this make it a "real mind"? My point is not that hooking up a hardware RNG to a computer magically transforms it into a "real brain," but that one needs significantly more sophisticated criteria if one wants to distinguish "real brains" from electromechanical systems than the ability to react differently to identical stimuli, since that can be trivially implemented in obviously-not-"real brain" systems.
Maybe the "positrons" are actually holes in an electron sea --- and "positronic brain" just scored higher with U.S. Robotic's marketing focus group than "holey synthmind".
I agree, it's a historically new thing for science to be funded off of wealth extracted from Capitalism. However, the point is that Capitalism has *never* been a particularly strong source of fundamental research. Research occurred prior to Capitalism, or under very non-Capitalist structures co-existing with Capitalism. Even most major "private" R&D, like much of the development of computers, relies on massive government subsidies. Claiming 20th-century science as a "victory" for Capitalism is utterly nonsensical, since only *deviations* from "pure" Capitalism provided the niches in which scientific progress occurs.
Creating "non-profit" university publishers will cost every taxpayer more money, because the people that will have to be hired to do this work will not be doing it for free, and instead of being paid for indirectly by grants (which can be taxpayer or private), they'll be on the taxpayer payroll.
As opposed to the taxpayer paying for all those things *plus* massive private profits by having private publishers do this? This will *save* the taxpayer money, because the taxpayer is *already* paying for all of Elsevier's work *and* profit margins.
IEEE is $185 a year, for which you get Spectrum and continual offers of life insurance. ACM is a more reasonable $99. ACS is $151.
Oooh, newspaper delivery prices! If $185 is "wacky" on your engineer's salary, you should consider looking for employers better able to use your skills than being a McDonald's fry chef. And, given my university's library budget for covering Elsevier's extortion costs, I'm (or, my research group) is already losing *way* more than $200 per person in journal costs.
Whether you like it or not, the professional publishers do provide a service that isn't free, so paying them for that service isn't unreasonable.
Paying for the actual costs of providing said services is reasonable. But Elsevier also gets this thing called "profit," where they rake in a billion dollars *more* than they need to pay for every single one of their own costs. They also arrange to provide services to maximize *profit,* rather than *services* --- at the expense of article availability to researchers. I suspect that, without the costs related to building elaborately paywalled restricted access archives, one could distribute Elsevier's content completely freely for a lot less than it costs to run Elsevier's profiteering operation.
If you want free journal articles, perhaps you should write the author and get a preprint?
Because maybe the author is dead, or might have better things to do than deal with personally handling the distribution of articles that a journal should be responsible for? If individual authors are supposed to handle archiving and distributing their own articles, then what are university libraries paying Elsevier's archive access extortion fees for?
A whole lot of cutting edge research was done for decades in the USSR under communist rule --- you can argue that wasn't true communism, but it sure wasn't Capitalism either. One might likewise say that the Capitalist sector wouldn't be sustainable without drawing on an immense amount of support from anti-Capitalist institutions.
What legislated criterion for self-awareness would you propose that could not trivially be achieved by a system intentionally designed to do so? A bit of readily-available image recognition software, and I can make a computer that will "pass" the mirror test. I suspect a fancy system like IBM's "Watson" could be configured to generate reasonably plausible "answers" to self-awareness test questions, at least with a level of coherency above that of lower-IQ humans.
The "brains" are 100% deterministic, which means that there is a great gap between the smartest robot and the dumbest dog.
Given the summary's caveat that "the robot will never see exactly the same input twice" --- how do you know even a smart dog wouldn't react identically given the exact same input twice? If you stick a random number generator into a robot's "brain," does it suddenly fall into a wholly different philosophical category?
Slashdot Mirror
You're that into fat beardly dudes? Sorry to let you down, AC, but I'm pretty sure I swing for the other team.
Yeah, I really wasn't thinking about the potential gender implications of my username (it's a lame joke based on SI prefixes that I tossed out on the spur of the moment when signing up for a Slashdot account). I am rarely mistaken for female in real life --- but it has been educational to see what sort of slimeballs a gender-ambiguous internet identity will lure out of the woodwork.
As a male, I guess I should be proud to have achieved cunt status. If people like you vigorously hate me, I must be doing something right to piss off the scumbags in this world.
Anyway, part of not being a fucking bigot is listening to women's voices on issues of discrimination. No matter how many angry men insist to me that women have reached full equality, it's really not a convincing argument compared to the dissenting accounts I hear from *women* I know. Guess what: your exclusively male view of the world may not be the final word on correctness. Rather than discount women's voices in assessing the state of gender equality, I'm willing to give them a lot more credibility than the room full of males insisting they'd never be sexist (unless the "bigoted feminazi cunt" deserved it).
what they're proposing is NOT a blind-to-gender society.
What many feminists are proposing is a not blind to existing gender inequalities and their sources society. Anti-feminists like to spread intentional confusion between wanting a gender-blind society and being blind to gender discrimination --- "you can't call out anyone for being misogynistic, because that proves you can still tell which victims of discrimination are female!"
Your feminist argument is 'men and women should be equal except women should be superior'.
And how did your amazing critical reading skills reach that conclusion, which has nothing to do with what I said?
You seem to have missed a big part of my argument, which is that *situations change with time,* so *particular things that wouldn't be necessary in the ideal future case of equality might be necessary while reacting to existing inequality.*
Suppose you see a dozen people locked up in chains. You think "in an ideal world, no one would be locked up in chains --- ergo, there would be no need to free anyone from chains". Are you a hypocrite for expending effort to cut through their chains (and even calling on others to help), because you said that in an ideal world no one would need to be freed from chains?
So exactly what part of bleeping out a word or phrase isn't "preventing others from speaking" that word or phrase?
If the reporter decided not to replay any of the bigot's speech at all on the evening news, would you say that they were censoring even more? Are they also censoring every other single person whose speech they don't replay? How do you separate "preventing others from speaking" from "not repeating what others are speaking," or "only repeating excerpts from what people are speaking, interspersed with monotonic musical interludes"? I think a concept of "censorship" in terms of "information filtering" is more generally applicable, and avoids all sorts of tricky ambiguities about what is and isn't "preventing others from speaking," especially where it's not clear they'd be able to speak in the first place (you might not assume that this bigot would, by default, get a speaking spot on the evening news).
By your argument if you had someone who was censored, you could argue that failing to stop them from speaking to the guy behind the counter at the 7-Eleven would mean that they hadn't been censored because you didn't stop all of their speech.
Yes, I would say that the intended/attempted censorship failed in the case of the words they managed to get across before being silenced. Similarly, if you shot at someone and missed (or gave them a little flesh wound), that would be *attempted* murder, not murder, and I wouldn't say the survivor of the attempt had been murdered.
Sorry, based on your post above, I thought this was the thread for wildly loose analogies. And where, in my post above, was I breaking any rules/laws? Corporations are trying to redefine how the web works, in order to establish a new "social contract" for commerce that doesn't work like the traditional "I give you money for stuff, then use stuff as I want." If you want to sell your content on the internet, then *sell your content on the internet*: take payment for it before letting it go out *your* door.
Here's perhaps a more careful analogy for how the internet works: I never enter your store. You have a storefront with a walk-up window (and maybe a big sign saying "Welcome! Free groceries!"). Anyone can send their browser agent to walk up and say "Hey! give me a rutabaga!" or likewise. It's your choice how to respond --- you can ignore them; you can tell them "we don't have rutabagas"; you can say "rutabagas are for paying customers only, please hand over your credit card first"; you can hand them a pile of cat photos; you can give them a rutabaga; you can give them a rutabaga with a religious tract stapled to the side. But whatever you hand over to them is now *theirs* to do with as they want. Scream all you want: "hey, no fair throwing the religious tract away before taking the rutabaga back to your master!", but my browser is OK to ignore you.
Corporations want to redefine how law works on the internet, such that by printing "by taking a rutabaga, you agree to read this religious tract" on the religious tract they hand out with the rutabaga, I am morally and/or legally bound to do so. But this is complete rubbish, and I utterly reject it. I block ads on websites. I never signed a contract with them saying "I will watch your ads." I sent my browser to their storefront, and they willingly handed over an ad-laden rutabaga, knowing that I had never agreed to their terms. If you don't like people stripping away your ads, then *don't hand out (ad-laden) content to any anonymous stranger who walks up and asks for it*. It's *your* responsibility to create a valid pre-existing contract with people viewing your content, and restrict who you hand out content to.
Yaknow, centuries of deeply entrenched stereotypes don't magically vanish away overnight. Lifting up counter-examples to the stereotype that women just aren't mentally cut out for logical/intellectual work is important to eradicating such views. Other young women should get the chance to see female role models praised in the media for accomplishments besides being Miss Teen America 2013. While an ultimate goal is reaching a society where it's nothing special for a woman to be a programmer, to *get there* from our present sexist world, one needs to actively push back against entrenched misogyny.
Your simplistic definition of censorship ("not preventing others from speaking") doesn't hold up. Suppose a xenophobic bigot is speaking on a public corner. If a news reporter records him, and plays his speech on the evening news with some of the most vile racial slurs bleeped out, then they're censoring his speech --- without stopping him from speaking; in fact, giving him a bigger audience for the non-censored parts. Censorship is filtering out material according to one's own preferences. Preventing others from speaking is one (especially vile) form of censorship: shooting the bigot for speaking would indeed filter out his material. So would standing next to him on the corner and blasting an air horn to bleep out some of his words --- which might even count as protected free expression of your own. I think censorship is a more ethically complex and nuanced issue that you imply; and covers a range of behaviors which aren't all inimical to a free society (such as applying censorship to material you choose to view for yourself).
So no one will notice systematic discrimination, which allows sexism to be a deeply rooted controlling factor for real-world systems so long as it's not too blatantly stated in writing?
In a sense it is: but you are applying the censorship only to what you see/hear. I think people should be permitted to self-censor. If I want to filter my view of the world to block out ********, then I should be able to do that. If I want to write a ********-filter plugin to help other people choose to avoid wasting their time on ******** too, then that's fine. The problem is when I impose censorship on others: if I'm the manager at the local telco monopoly, I shouldn't be installing network filters to keep ******** off my customers' computers (if they want to do so themselves, fine).
I know the temptation! However, the "being exactly like me is the gold standard for sentience" line of thinking is what gives people ideas like "the Negro race is clearly sub-human; we do them a great favor by ennobling them from useless savages into productive slaves." While an *easy* answer to the question of sentience, "be like me!" might not be a particularly good method for evaluating physically non-human sentience, given how poorly humanity has done at recognizing even fellow human sentience.
Suppose a grocery store had their door wide open, and a big banner out front:
"Come in! Take what you want! It's all FREE!**"
** produce may contain venomous mind-altering spiders that will turn you into an obedient zombie slave.
So now, I put on my spider-proof suit before entering the store, and when I get home, I rinse all the produce in boiling acid to kill off the spiders. When the grocery store manager calls me up to say "Hey, asshole, we make all our money off reselling zombie slaves! How do you expect us to give you free groceries, if you protect yourself from the spiders?," I'm not gonna be particularly receptive to his arguments.
You missed the point that not all grants are tax-funded. Corporations also provide grants to do research, as do private foundations.
(a) what fraction is this in most fields? In particle physics (my own area), I've never seen any privately funded research --- but we're stuck with Elsevier journals.
(b) regardless, why should private grants paying extra for Elsevier's profits be any better? Wouldn't a private granter be happier paying less for non-profit journal systems, too?
Except there is no newspaper. There's a monthly magazine.
OK; you don't see the value in professional organizations. Others do --- including value beyond delivering magazines to our door, such as organizing conferences, scholarships, promoting research, even *providing journals better for the progress of science than profiteering schmucks.*
That's how capitalism works. People who risk money get to profit when the risk pays off.
And, when you lock in a monopoly position (such as is granted through exclusive intellectual property rights to journal articles), you can hoover up mega profits! Some of us don't think Capitalism is a good idea even in the *best* of cases, but this is the very *worst* of Capitalism --- the hideous face of monopolistic moneygrubbing.
The "extortion" fees are because they are making it more convenient for you to get the information, a service which costs real money.
Elsevier's profit margins are *absolute proof* that these services could be provided for at least 30% lower cost. With charges that range into hundreds of thousands of dollars per year per institution for hosting a few tens of thousands of PDF pages of archive material, do you seriously think this couldn't be done ***way*** cheaper (such as at the rates consistently provided by non-profit journals, which are often ~10% of Elsevier's fees for similar services)?
Your tests appear to be strongly centered on a specifically "human-centric" --- and even distinctly culturally biased --- definition of "self awareness." If you just want to test that someone is human, you can have them come in for blood tests and an MRI. Perhaps your "self-awareness" test is too narrow --- I think even a lot of humans would fail --- to be sensible for evaluating "sentience" in non-human beings? Let's consider some of the particular points of your test; keeping in mind how a "machine impostor" with, e.g., the capabilities of IBM's "Watson," a "normal" human, or an "intelligent alien" might fare:
Expression of preferences
itself pretty easy to "fake" --- the "machine impostor" just needs a way to assign "preference" scores to nouns. Easy example: rate things by how popular they are on Google. An "I love it because it's most popular" teenager might be shallow, but are they non-sentient?
...explain their judgements opinions biases, and reasons for their decisions in writings
So, sentient life needs to know how to write? And even a human's reasons for preferences are well-thought-out and logically arguable? Or would a "machine impostor" programmed to answer "all my friends like it," or "I don't know... I just smile inside thinking of it" pass?
rank arguments according to how persuasive it was, how natural the argument was, and to what extent the arguments are emotionally persuasive.
So the 90% of humans who have pretty abysmal writing/argumentation skills would fail? And, for "explaining" preferences, a pretty limited number of "canned" fill-in-the-blanks approaches would work for a "computer impostor" --- even a "justification" for an "I like what's popular" ranking.
the subject has to read a paper...
So, sentient life needs to be able to read (in what language??)
social skills in a chat simulation.
I know quite a few people who would be terrible at this. Again, there is a strong assumption of shared language --- I'd fare worse than the dumbest chat bot in a Chinese chat room.
for example, campaigning to be elected for a virtual office, writing political speeches, and employing bargaining techniques and other methods, to persuade a sufficient number, to cast their vote in favor of the test subject.
Holy cultural specificity! Given the range of persuasive/political/bargaining techniques used for different audiences, what might be most persuasive to one group is the exact opposite to another --- when I listen to popular right-wing US politicians, the only thing I come away convinced of is "wow, they really shouldn't be anywhere near public office."
after having thoroughly expressed their preferences, are presented with a series of dilemmas ... which principle or preference, moral, or value they choose to sacrifice in a situation
How many humans have coherent, well-thought-out moral systems? Something deep enough to pose dilemmas, that can't be "resolved" by just picking an arbitrary outcome and "justifying" it with "whoa, that's hard, I don't know? I guess just do the first option?
demonstration of ability to select and make appropriate sacrifices when called for, ability to decide to self-sacrifice
I don't personally hold a high opinion of Ayn Rand's disciples, but is a selfish person non-sentient?
and the ability to defy the letter of the rules, when necessary
again, is a legalistic "rule of law above all; I trust my superiors" type non-sentient, even if they are a menace to humanity?
Your test is strongly skewed towards identifying "sentience" with a highly literate, culturally-specific type of human. Pretty much all your tests are useless for a sentient being that doesn't read/write whatever language
A free space electron-positron annihilation will release two 511keV gammas, but a hole in an electron valence band in a semiconductor can annihilate with a conduction band electron with considerably less energy release.
Yes, I know Asimov wasn't trying to accurately describe a real technology when coining the term "positronic brain," and wouldn't have been considering solid state electronics design in the 1940s.
And this is a major reason why profiling results in complete failure: if having DARE stickers on a car reduces chances of being pulled over, then drug runners will slap DARE stickers (and maybe a "Friends of $CITY Police Department fundraiser campaign 2013" decal for good measure) all over their smuggling cars.
On the contrary, I'd say the posting style significantly speeds up parsing, by encouraging people to entirely skip over the content past the first few words --- and nothing of value is lost.
"I WHOOOOOSH how many people tell me it is legitimate."
FTFTFTFY
You can hook up a hardware random noise generator to a computer --- that relies on "physical" noise processes which are as random as anything else we know in the universe. So yes, you can have "random numbers" in computer science --- even if not generated by an algorithm --- but as a mathematical ideal against which to compare pseudo-random generators, or the result of a "true" hardware random source. So, one can build a robot that won't necessarily act deterministically; even one that incorporates results from previous actions into its state ("memory") to create different reactions to future applications of the same stimuli. Does this make it a "real mind"? My point is not that hooking up a hardware RNG to a computer magically transforms it into a "real brain," but that one needs significantly more sophisticated criteria if one wants to distinguish "real brains" from electromechanical systems than the ability to react differently to identical stimuli, since that can be trivially implemented in obviously-not-"real brain" systems.
Maybe the "positrons" are actually holes in an electron sea --- and "positronic brain" just scored higher with U.S. Robotic's marketing focus group than "holey synthmind".
I agree, it's a historically new thing for science to be funded off of wealth extracted from Capitalism. However, the point is that Capitalism has *never* been a particularly strong source of fundamental research. Research occurred prior to Capitalism, or under very non-Capitalist structures co-existing with Capitalism. Even most major "private" R&D, like much of the development of computers, relies on massive government subsidies. Claiming 20th-century science as a "victory" for Capitalism is utterly nonsensical, since only *deviations* from "pure" Capitalism provided the niches in which scientific progress occurs.
Creating "non-profit" university publishers will cost every taxpayer more money, because the people that will have to be hired to do this work will not be doing it for free, and instead of being paid for indirectly by grants (which can be taxpayer or private), they'll be on the taxpayer payroll.
As opposed to the taxpayer paying for all those things *plus* massive private profits by having private publishers do this? This will *save* the taxpayer money, because the taxpayer is *already* paying for all of Elsevier's work *and* profit margins.
IEEE is $185 a year, for which you get Spectrum and continual offers of life insurance. ACM is a more reasonable $99. ACS is $151.
Oooh, newspaper delivery prices! If $185 is "wacky" on your engineer's salary, you should consider looking for employers better able to use your skills than being a McDonald's fry chef. And, given my university's library budget for covering Elsevier's extortion costs, I'm (or, my research group) is already losing *way* more than $200 per person in journal costs.
Whether you like it or not, the professional publishers do provide a service that isn't free, so paying them for that service isn't unreasonable.
Paying for the actual costs of providing said services is reasonable. But Elsevier also gets this thing called "profit," where they rake in a billion dollars *more* than they need to pay for every single one of their own costs. They also arrange to provide services to maximize *profit,* rather than *services* --- at the expense of article availability to researchers. I suspect that, without the costs related to building elaborately paywalled restricted access archives, one could distribute Elsevier's content completely freely for a lot less than it costs to run Elsevier's profiteering operation.
If you want free journal articles, perhaps you should write the author and get a preprint?
Because maybe the author is dead, or might have better things to do than deal with personally handling the distribution of articles that a journal should be responsible for? If individual authors are supposed to handle archiving and distributing their own articles, then what are university libraries paying Elsevier's archive access extortion fees for?
A whole lot of cutting edge research was done for decades in the USSR under communist rule --- you can argue that wasn't true communism, but it sure wasn't Capitalism either. One might likewise say that the Capitalist sector wouldn't be sustainable without drawing on an immense amount of support from anti-Capitalist institutions.
What legislated criterion for self-awareness would you propose that could not trivially be achieved by a system intentionally designed to do so? A bit of readily-available image recognition software, and I can make a computer that will "pass" the mirror test. I suspect a fancy system like IBM's "Watson" could be configured to generate reasonably plausible "answers" to self-awareness test questions, at least with a level of coherency above that of lower-IQ humans.
The "brains" are 100% deterministic, which means that there is a great gap between the smartest robot and the dumbest dog.
Given the summary's caveat that "the robot will never see exactly the same input twice" --- how do you know even a smart dog wouldn't react identically given the exact same input twice? If you stick a random number generator into a robot's "brain," does it suddenly fall into a wholly different philosophical category?