I'm all in favor of focusing on preventing automobile deaths. In fact, if we scrapped the entire "war on terror" and used those hundreds of billions to build out public transport infrastructure befitting a first-world nation, we'd be doing far better in the "saving lives" department. However, a significant difference between cars and guns: cars provide a heck of a lot more than 50% more useful functionality to society than guns, so they're perhaps "worth" slightly more carnage. Which would cause more problems: all the guns in the country spontaneously jamming and failing to fire, or all the cars in the country breaking down?
Really? Places with no guns have zero people? Aside from pedantic arguments that alternate prior histories would produce alternate people (so "you" in specific would not be here, but a lot of different people would), I'd say the entire history of human civilization before guns (and continued existence of humans in regions of less or no guns) flatly contradicts the idea that guns are a basic necessity of life.
As I agree in another branch of this thread, we probably will find "non-brainlike" methods to generate all sorts of "intelligent" behavior, continuing the same type of progress (not particularly worrying about biologically accurate brain models) that gives us self-driving cars. On the other hand, it's a separate worthwhile field of study to learn how *our* brains work, through models that capture key features of biological brains.
If our models lead us to *understanding* of how brains work, we could get there a good deal faster and find that present day computers are plenty complex to handle cognition on a human-equivalent level.
Maybe; maybe not. Our understanding might well *not* allow much brain function (above the Drosophila level, which is about appropriate for a moderate sized supercomputer today) to be vastly simplified for lesser computing resources --- maybe you do *need* zillions of complexly interlinked neurons to see more interesting higher level behaviors (in a brain-like manner, not by creating non-brainlike intelligences like the self-driving car that have similar "skills"). The brain may not neatly "factor" into simple-to-computationally-model "subsystems". If you look at, e.g., chemical pathway maps for how a cell functions, everything is tangled together with everything else --- biological systems often evolve "spaghetti code" solutions to problems, without the neatly defined boundaries and modularity that a "top down" systems designer would impose.
I suppose some of the urge to "anthropomorphize" AIs comes from the lack of precedent, and even understanding of what is possible, outside of the two established categories of "calculating machine" and "biological brain." Some tasks and approaches are "obviously computery": if you need to sort a list of a trillion numbers, that's clearly a job for an old-fashioned computer with a sort algorithm. On the other hand, other tasks seem very "human": say, having a discussion about art and religion. There is some range of "animal" tasks in-between, like image recognition and navigating through complex 3D environments. But we have no analogous mental category to non-biological "intelligent" systems --- so we think of them in terms of replicating and even being biological brains, without appropriate language for other possibilities.
Yes, I intended my very weasel-worded phrase to convey that even our present ability to "understand" Drosophila melanogaster is rather shallow and shaky --- your analysis of my words covers what I meant to include pretty well.
why do we feel the need to claim that intelligent machines would need to be similar to or work like real brains?
I don't think we do. In fact, machines acting in utterly un-brainlike manners are extremely useful to me *today* --- when I want human-style brain functions, I've already got one of those installed in my head; computers are great for doing all the other tasks. However, making machines that work like brains might be the only way to understand how our own brains work --- a separate but also interesting task from making machines more useful at doing "intelligent" work in un-brainlike manners.
Do you really think AI will not follow a moore type law? It will probably be even more aggressive.
I personally expect Moore's Law to set a lower bound on the time needed for advancement. Doubling every 18-24 months means 20-30 years to get human-sized big ol' clusters of neurons. However, there's also so much work to do on understanding the specifics of how to get particular results (e.g. language and "symbolic thought") instead of just gigantic twitching masses of incoherent craziness.
In order to try out ideas and test hypotheses, you really need to be able to run a whole bunch of human-brain-scale simulators at far higher speed than the human brain (learning a language takes a couple years for a developing human brain, and you're very unlikely to get this "right" with only one or two tries). I think once we have 10^3 - 10^6 times more "raw neuron simulation" processing power than a single human brain (so another 10 to 40 years after the 20-30 years for single-brain neuron simulations), then we'll be able to crank out simulations of the "hard stuff" fast enough to make rapid progress on the high-level issues. Of course, this means once you do have a couple "breakthroughs" in generating self-aware, learning, human-language-understanding machines, you're very suddenly dropped into having far-exceeding-human artificial intelligences, without so much of a slow progression through "retarded chimpanzee" stages first.
AI certainly is a moving target --- I remember when "play chess at an advanced human level" was considered an (unachievable) goalpost for "real AI." On the other hand, I'm not certain we're ready by default for the capabilities of machines, intelligent or no.
Are we ready to blur the line between hardware and wetware?
We can now almost convincingly partially recreate the wetware functions of Drosophila melanogaster. Whether we're *ready* for this is another question; as is whether this is what folks have in mind by "AI."
Given that the blurb on the HiRISE page say "but for now this is a mystery," I'm not seeing any evidence of scientists being scared of saying they don't know. In fact, making a high profile general public article highlighting stuff you don't understand seems like the exact opposite of the scientists being scared to point out what you don't know.
Only if you have enough oil to dump. Try pouring a quart of crude oil onto your senator's plate when he's eating at a fancy seafood restaurant, and you'll get a far less friendly response than if you dumped over two hundred million gallons on the food supply and livelihood of millions of gulf coast residents.
They just seem to cost more because the USPS being funded by taxes!
That would be a great point, besides the fact that it's blatantly false. The USPS is funded by the revenues they make from their sales --- despite being a constitutionally authorized government function, required to provide service even to unprofitable distant rural residents.
If I start a company who dumps oil into the ocean by accident and it kills people / animals I'm held responsible.
Only if your company isn't big enough to act with virtual impunity. Who was put in jail when BP murdered twelve people and devastated the gulf coast ecosystem, in order to cut maintenance costs?
That might not be a useful criterion. High level concepts like "reality vs. identical simulation" are distinguished at the topmost levels of conscious symbolic thought --- but that's only a small portion of your brain. When you start fooling/re-training your subconscious, it might not matter so much that your high-level symbolic thought knows "this is only a game."
Visual realism of rendering is only one component of this; at least equally important is your mode of interaction with the world. If you're using a game pad, then, no matter how realistic the visuals, your subconscious mind is training itself to respond with sequences of finger twitches --- and in the real world, where you don't have a game pad in hand to move your body, such low-level associations do absolutely nothing. But now suppose you spend lots of time in a simulator where, when you hear an opponent sneaking up behind you, you physically spin around and punch out their face (moving your body just as in real life). And you get very good at this game, conditioned to a twitchy response that doesn't wait for consideration by the upper rational conscious. Then a friend in real life accidentally startles you by stepping out of a side corridor behind you. Does your upper conscious mind --- that knows this isn't the simulation --- have a chance to intervene, before your conditioned reflexes make you punch them in the face?
Black people don't randomly get born to white people.
So what? They still live suckier lives when surrounded by racist haters. By your logic, they should bleach their own skin and never let anyone see who their parents are, rather than fighting back against racism.
You love being obtuse to justify your hate, don't you? The only "problems" with being gay are created entirely by haters like you, who mistreat gays because you've decided that the shape of their body is wrong for the shape of bodies of people they are attracted to. Being blind, or mentally disabled: you actually can't do the same things an "average" adult can, and require different treatment to compensate. Being gay: *exactly* like being any other normal human, aside from the fine mechanical details of copulation, for which haters think they should burn in hell, despite having *zero* impact on how they live the entirety of their public lives outside the bedroom. So, yes, when a "problem" can be fixed merely by an attitude change in others (which won't bring back sight to the blind or IQ points to the mentally handicapped), then I do think "the rest of the world is the problem".
Hey, I'm not a trained professional in maximizing human suffering. You can't expect my glib internet responses to hit on the efficient solutions that real experts in extreme cruelty know. The CIA has undoubtedly dedicated far more time and diligent research to causing unimaginable suffering than I have.
Here we have people who are obviously abnormal (maybe 1% or 3%, whatever), who obviously have brain structure differences, and who are obviously having problems. They are far more likely to commit suicide. In the USA, they are far more likely to get HIV. By any objective measure, we ought to be searching for a cure.
I suppose you also think we should find a cure for being black (or other reviled minority) in heavily white-racist dominated regions? Guess what: the "cure" that works is treating your fellow gay human beings like human beings. In societies where being openly gay, publicly admitting the fact that you love your same-sex partner, isn't treated as less human than being equally openly heterosexual, the problems with suicide and risky sexual behavior vanish away. By this diagnosis, *you* are the cause of the deleterious symptoms of being gay. A "cure" for homophobia would fix all the problems. Your disgusting faked "compassion" for homosexuals --- seeking to "cure" them when you are the disease --- is a virulent strain I hope will die out in society. Just be glad that I'm not so "objective" as you are so as to wish to hurry that along by less than natural processes.
So, when does a "first person shooter" become too "first person"? In the past, it's been obvious that video game players stomping on turtles and blowing away enemies on a tiny computer screen can easily tell the difference between real life and game realities --- whatever keyboard-mashing reflexes they develop won't correspond to real-world actions. But, is there some point when game realism becomes so immersive that deep physiological responses to your virtual character's fate are invoked, and the human brain stops clearly drawing the line between reality inside and outside the computer world? When interaction with game opponents is done through the same whole-body movements, with realistic visual/sensitive feedback, as real-world actions? At the subconscious level (which, according to numerous fMRI studies, often decides actions before the conscious mind rationalizes choices), can we still distinguish between virtual and real worlds once the technology for fully realistic virtual interactions catches up? Will the crippling PTSD experienced by soldiers involved in real combat start to show up among early adopters of overly realistic simulations?
Ha! That's why I always edit code on a black background! Unfortunately, some nefarious miscreants seem to have deleted every line of code before I can download it; all I see is a blank screen whenever I go to edit.
Even funnier if they're still around for the aftermath of the joke. Don't decapitate --- just a precise shot of paralytic to the top of the spinal cord, followed by a photorealistic rendering (through the goggles) of the goggles being removed... to reveal the severed-head's view of the "real world" simulation room. Dim lights to black; leave them there to contemplate.
No, it doesn't assume the optical link can't be tapped. In fact, the quantum encoding is specifically a defense against the optical link being tapped. The data is sent one photon at a time. If a tapper captures the photon (even by leakage from evanescent waves), they destroy the information --- and are neither able to know for themselves, or reliably re-send to the receiver, the bit that was sent. If the tapper doesn't capture the photon, they they haven't tapped the line. At the receiving end, getting too high a dropped bit rate (or scrambled nonsense bits) lets you know the line is compromised, while the attacker still doesn't get any useful information.
How stringent is underage drinking checking anyway in South Africa at big outdoor concerts? Perhaps the delivery zone is already restricted admittance for above drinking age only. The payment method (when you make orders by phone) may also allow some level of age verification.
In TFA, the intended application for this particular topology is big industrial/infrastructure control systems --- where you typically already have a central hub (which needs to be properly secured) with fiber links to many controllers. The technology works over typical existing fiber, and requires only relatively inexpensive transmitters at the end nodes (with one more expensive receiving photon detector at the central hub). No reason you couldn't use the same principles with redundant fiber connections to multiple central hubs. But, if laying fiber is itself too much of an obstacle, then you're probably out of luck for "quantum" solutions.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm all in favor of focusing on preventing automobile deaths. In fact, if we scrapped the entire "war on terror" and used those hundreds of billions to build out public transport infrastructure befitting a first-world nation, we'd be doing far better in the "saving lives" department. However, a significant difference between cars and guns: cars provide a heck of a lot more than 50% more useful functionality to society than guns, so they're perhaps "worth" slightly more carnage. Which would cause more problems: all the guns in the country spontaneously jamming and failing to fire, or all the cars in the country breaking down?
Really? Places with no guns have zero people? Aside from pedantic arguments that alternate prior histories would produce alternate people (so "you" in specific would not be here, but a lot of different people would), I'd say the entire history of human civilization before guns (and continued existence of humans in regions of less or no guns) flatly contradicts the idea that guns are a basic necessity of life.
how long until they can run for elected office?
Too late; they're already overqualified --- no one so easily slandered as an "intellectual" by the opposition has much of a chance in elections.
As I agree in another branch of this thread, we probably will find "non-brainlike" methods to generate all sorts of "intelligent" behavior, continuing the same type of progress (not particularly worrying about biologically accurate brain models) that gives us self-driving cars. On the other hand, it's a separate worthwhile field of study to learn how *our* brains work, through models that capture key features of biological brains.
If our models lead us to *understanding* of how brains work, we could get there a good deal faster and find that present day computers are plenty complex to handle cognition on a human-equivalent level.
Maybe; maybe not. Our understanding might well *not* allow much brain function (above the Drosophila level, which is about appropriate for a moderate sized supercomputer today) to be vastly simplified for lesser computing resources --- maybe you do *need* zillions of complexly interlinked neurons to see more interesting higher level behaviors (in a brain-like manner, not by creating non-brainlike intelligences like the self-driving car that have similar "skills"). The brain may not neatly "factor" into simple-to-computationally-model "subsystems". If you look at, e.g., chemical pathway maps for how a cell functions, everything is tangled together with everything else --- biological systems often evolve "spaghetti code" solutions to problems, without the neatly defined boundaries and modularity that a "top down" systems designer would impose.
I suppose some of the urge to "anthropomorphize" AIs comes from the lack of precedent, and even understanding of what is possible, outside of the two established categories of "calculating machine" and "biological brain." Some tasks and approaches are "obviously computery": if you need to sort a list of a trillion numbers, that's clearly a job for an old-fashioned computer with a sort algorithm. On the other hand, other tasks seem very "human": say, having a discussion about art and religion. There is some range of "animal" tasks in-between, like image recognition and navigating through complex 3D environments. But we have no analogous mental category to non-biological "intelligent" systems --- so we think of them in terms of replicating and even being biological brains, without appropriate language for other possibilities.
Yes, I intended my very weasel-worded phrase to convey that even our present ability to "understand" Drosophila melanogaster is rather shallow and shaky --- your analysis of my words covers what I meant to include pretty well.
why do we feel the need to claim that intelligent machines would need to be similar to or work like real brains?
I don't think we do. In fact, machines acting in utterly un-brainlike manners are extremely useful to me *today* --- when I want human-style brain functions, I've already got one of those installed in my head; computers are great for doing all the other tasks. However, making machines that work like brains might be the only way to understand how our own brains work --- a separate but also interesting task from making machines more useful at doing "intelligent" work in un-brainlike manners.
Do you really think AI will not follow a moore type law? It will probably be even more aggressive.
I personally expect Moore's Law to set a lower bound on the time needed for advancement. Doubling every 18-24 months means 20-30 years to get human-sized big ol' clusters of neurons. However, there's also so much work to do on understanding the specifics of how to get particular results (e.g. language and "symbolic thought") instead of just gigantic twitching masses of incoherent craziness.
In order to try out ideas and test hypotheses, you really need to be able to run a whole bunch of human-brain-scale simulators at far higher speed than the human brain (learning a language takes a couple years for a developing human brain, and you're very unlikely to get this "right" with only one or two tries). I think once we have 10^3 - 10^6 times more "raw neuron simulation" processing power than a single human brain (so another 10 to 40 years after the 20-30 years for single-brain neuron simulations), then we'll be able to crank out simulations of the "hard stuff" fast enough to make rapid progress on the high-level issues. Of course, this means once you do have a couple "breakthroughs" in generating self-aware, learning, human-language-understanding machines, you're very suddenly dropped into having far-exceeding-human artificial intelligences, without so much of a slow progression through "retarded chimpanzee" stages first.
AI certainly is a moving target --- I remember when "play chess at an advanced human level" was considered an (unachievable) goalpost for "real AI." On the other hand, I'm not certain we're ready by default for the capabilities of machines, intelligent or no.
Are we ready to blur the line between hardware and wetware?
We can now almost convincingly partially recreate the wetware functions of Drosophila melanogaster. Whether we're *ready* for this is another question; as is whether this is what folks have in mind by "AI."
Given that the blurb on the HiRISE page say "but for now this is a mystery," I'm not seeing any evidence of scientists being scared of saying they don't know. In fact, making a high profile general public article highlighting stuff you don't understand seems like the exact opposite of the scientists being scared to point out what you don't know.
Only if you have enough oil to dump. Try pouring a quart of crude oil onto your senator's plate when he's eating at a fancy seafood restaurant, and you'll get a far less friendly response than if you dumped over two hundred million gallons on the food supply and livelihood of millions of gulf coast residents.
They just seem to cost more because the USPS being funded by taxes!
That would be a great point, besides the fact that it's blatantly false. The USPS is funded by the revenues they make from their sales --- despite being a constitutionally authorized government function, required to provide service even to unprofitable distant rural residents.
If I start a company who dumps oil into the ocean by accident and it kills people / animals I'm held responsible.
Only if your company isn't big enough to act with virtual impunity. Who was put in jail when BP murdered twelve people and devastated the gulf coast ecosystem, in order to cut maintenance costs?
If you want multiple endpoints then you either need the 2^n connection growth
I'll assume you meant to type n^2, unless you're a network hardware salesman looking to make a lot of extra sales :)
That might not be a useful criterion. High level concepts like "reality vs. identical simulation" are distinguished at the topmost levels of conscious symbolic thought --- but that's only a small portion of your brain. When you start fooling/re-training your subconscious, it might not matter so much that your high-level symbolic thought knows "this is only a game."
Visual realism of rendering is only one component of this; at least equally important is your mode of interaction with the world. If you're using a game pad, then, no matter how realistic the visuals, your subconscious mind is training itself to respond with sequences of finger twitches --- and in the real world, where you don't have a game pad in hand to move your body, such low-level associations do absolutely nothing. But now suppose you spend lots of time in a simulator where, when you hear an opponent sneaking up behind you, you physically spin around and punch out their face (moving your body just as in real life). And you get very good at this game, conditioned to a twitchy response that doesn't wait for consideration by the upper rational conscious. Then a friend in real life accidentally startles you by stepping out of a side corridor behind you. Does your upper conscious mind --- that knows this isn't the simulation --- have a chance to intervene, before your conditioned reflexes make you punch them in the face?
Black people don't randomly get born to white people.
So what? They still live suckier lives when surrounded by racist haters. By your logic, they should bleach their own skin and never let anyone see who their parents are, rather than fighting back against racism.
You love being obtuse to justify your hate, don't you? The only "problems" with being gay are created entirely by haters like you, who mistreat gays because you've decided that the shape of their body is wrong for the shape of bodies of people they are attracted to. Being blind, or mentally disabled: you actually can't do the same things an "average" adult can, and require different treatment to compensate. Being gay: *exactly* like being any other normal human, aside from the fine mechanical details of copulation, for which haters think they should burn in hell, despite having *zero* impact on how they live the entirety of their public lives outside the bedroom. So, yes, when a "problem" can be fixed merely by an attitude change in others (which won't bring back sight to the blind or IQ points to the mentally handicapped), then I do think "the rest of the world is the problem".
Hey, I'm not a trained professional in maximizing human suffering. You can't expect my glib internet responses to hit on the efficient solutions that real experts in extreme cruelty know. The CIA has undoubtedly dedicated far more time and diligent research to causing unimaginable suffering than I have.
Here we have people who are obviously abnormal (maybe 1% or 3%, whatever), who obviously have brain structure differences, and who are obviously having problems. They are far more likely to commit suicide. In the USA, they are far more likely to get HIV. By any objective measure, we ought to be searching for a cure.
I suppose you also think we should find a cure for being black (or other reviled minority) in heavily white-racist dominated regions? Guess what: the "cure" that works is treating your fellow gay human beings like human beings. In societies where being openly gay, publicly admitting the fact that you love your same-sex partner, isn't treated as less human than being equally openly heterosexual, the problems with suicide and risky sexual behavior vanish away. By this diagnosis, *you* are the cause of the deleterious symptoms of being gay. A "cure" for homophobia would fix all the problems. Your disgusting faked "compassion" for homosexuals --- seeking to "cure" them when you are the disease --- is a virulent strain I hope will die out in society. Just be glad that I'm not so "objective" as you are so as to wish to hurry that along by less than natural processes.
So, when does a "first person shooter" become too "first person"? In the past, it's been obvious that video game players stomping on turtles and blowing away enemies on a tiny computer screen can easily tell the difference between real life and game realities --- whatever keyboard-mashing reflexes they develop won't correspond to real-world actions. But, is there some point when game realism becomes so immersive that deep physiological responses to your virtual character's fate are invoked, and the human brain stops clearly drawing the line between reality inside and outside the computer world? When interaction with game opponents is done through the same whole-body movements, with realistic visual/sensitive feedback, as real-world actions? At the subconscious level (which, according to numerous fMRI studies, often decides actions before the conscious mind rationalizes choices), can we still distinguish between virtual and real worlds once the technology for fully realistic virtual interactions catches up? Will the crippling PTSD experienced by soldiers involved in real combat start to show up among early adopters of overly realistic simulations?
Ha! That's why I always edit code on a black background! Unfortunately, some nefarious miscreants seem to have deleted every line of code before I can download it; all I see is a blank screen whenever I go to edit.
Even funnier if they're still around for the aftermath of the joke. Don't decapitate --- just a precise shot of paralytic to the top of the spinal cord, followed by a photorealistic rendering (through the goggles) of the goggles being removed... to reveal the severed-head's view of the "real world" simulation room. Dim lights to black; leave them there to contemplate.
No, it doesn't assume the optical link can't be tapped. In fact, the quantum encoding is specifically a defense against the optical link being tapped. The data is sent one photon at a time. If a tapper captures the photon (even by leakage from evanescent waves), they destroy the information --- and are neither able to know for themselves, or reliably re-send to the receiver, the bit that was sent. If the tapper doesn't capture the photon, they they haven't tapped the line. At the receiving end, getting too high a dropped bit rate (or scrambled nonsense bits) lets you know the line is compromised, while the attacker still doesn't get any useful information.
How stringent is underage drinking checking anyway in South Africa at big outdoor concerts? Perhaps the delivery zone is already restricted admittance for above drinking age only. The payment method (when you make orders by phone) may also allow some level of age verification.
In TFA, the intended application for this particular topology is big industrial/infrastructure control systems --- where you typically already have a central hub (which needs to be properly secured) with fiber links to many controllers. The technology works over typical existing fiber, and requires only relatively inexpensive transmitters at the end nodes (with one more expensive receiving photon detector at the central hub). No reason you couldn't use the same principles with redundant fiber connections to multiple central hubs. But, if laying fiber is itself too much of an obstacle, then you're probably out of luck for "quantum" solutions.
Perhaps when impenetrable mobs are blocking all the roads between the store and your front porch. Until then, ... no. Even then, ... no.