It's only a black box if you believe that it does not follow rules, even if you do not understand what those rules are (god of the gaps).
Quantum mechanics follows rules, and one of those rules is that measuring a property of a quantum system makes it discard the current value (if any) of the complementary property. The clockwork model of Newtonian physics is simply incorrect; reality actually works in terms of competing possibilities. Or at least that's our current best interpretation of it.
You cannot have free will in a system that follows rules
Like I said before, you are such a system, because your personality determines what you want. Your will is part of the universe and its causal chains just as much as the electromagnetic force is, not something external held prisoner by those chains.
To be blunt: how exactly is it that you are so stupid to believe anything other the fact that North Korea gets a bad image in our media solely because the US lost a war to it and the interests of some astronomically wealthy businessmen suffered?
To also be blunt: North Korea gets a bad image in media because there's nothing nice about North Korea. It's a country-sized concentration camp led by a succession of particularly nasty dicators who's only interest or competence is taking all power and wealth for themselves.
Kim Whatever is basically the archetypal robber baron elevated to the status of a king.
A country of incompetents or a determined country that has independently developed many technologies despite half the world shunning it: pick one.
A prison camp who's warden has his victims build weapons based on technology that's sufficiently outdated everywhere else to be declassified. And they seem to be failing even at that.
Aren't you nerds supposed to be smart or something? Shame.
I would think any laser powerful enough to take out a missile would so heavily ionize the atmosphere around it that it would be irrelevant whether the laser itself was made out of visible frequencies or not.
Why would it? Even if some energy is absorbed by air, it's along a hair-thin path, so convection and conduction should keep the temperature well beneath disassociation point.
Or, perhaps you're one of the very quiet "I hate Trump" people, who sort of condemn the violence, but not really.
Mod parent up. This has been the major weakness of us on the left for far too long: the willingness to tolerate unethical behaviour or even outright violence in the name of our goal. Soviet Union demonstrated where attempts to build a better world with the power of the dark side will inevitably go, yet some people apparently still think they can use it when it's convenient without having it dominate their destiny. It's time to stop being useful idiots and start building a better tomorrow, not just one where the monster in charge wears our insignia rather than those of our enemies.
To be very blunt, the people involved in the unrest really do not matter to technical advance.
To also be very blunt, technical advance doesn't create a bright fututure - or have any impact at all - unless you can get its fruits into the hands of people. And that's pretty difficult to do if they're preoccupied with killing you.
Only a small percentage of them would be of any use even if they could be interested in technical advancement, so frankly it is better for technical people to ignore civil unrest - beyond finding somewhere to work that is more isolated from the practical effects of same, which is what they have done with Silicon Valley.
To continue being blunt, Silicon Valley is neither self-sufficient nor a fortress. Should civil order break down, it's not going to be Galt's Gulch, it's going to be a tomb, with the only question being whether the "technical people" get lynched or starve first. And even in the unlikely event that Silicon Valley would emerge more or less intact, with the rest of the country collapsed it won't be able to afford to feed a large population of "technical people" who aren't immediately productive.
Civil unrest will always come and go in waves, I would argue it is basically utterly irrelevant compared to advancing technology which drags forward all of humanity, willing or not.
And yet more bluntness: civil unrest comes and goes in waves. Sometimes it goes because people get what they wanted, and sometimes because the entire society crumbles and results in another Dark Age. Seeing how what people want typically amounts to bread and circuses, and we have an abundance of both, wouldn't it make more sense to appease the unwashed masses than letting the situation escalate?
Germany essentially does not have long term debt or unfunded liabilities of consequence because they know the effect from their post WW1 collapse.
Germany is doing well because it's the strongest economy in the Euro which is set up so that wealth flows there from everyone else. Whether that was the plan all along or just the result of economic fundamentalism I can't say, but it's taking the whole EU towards disintegration, at which point Europe will return to being the warzone it used to be - and that means Germany, as the strongest nation here, is going to end up making another error of judgement and subsequently burned to the ground again sooner or later.
In other words, Germany is just as dumb as the rest of them, it just manifests in different ways.
You are just asserting that it isn't a Platonic Ideal by means of simply saying it isn't.
"But that's not a Platonic Ideal, because your idea of an apple is stored in your brain and is a separate object from mine."
Ultimately, we interact coherently on the topic insofar as we have the -same- model of "apple", and it is not merely an arbitrary and subjective mental construct.
No, we don't have the same model of an apple. We both have our own models located in our separate brains. Those models are similar because they were constructed by entities - us - who share almost all of our evolutionary history, about a set of objects - apples - produced by entities - apple trees - which also share almost all of their evolutionary history. While one can speculate about an universal ideal of an apple, such ideal isn't actually necessary to explain the similarities of our models.
An appreciation for the fact that scarcity exists somewhere?
Why would it? If you have abundance, and care about this issue enough to traumatize your children over it, surely you'd just use your unbounded resources to uplift that "somewhere else" to your level?
A sympathy for others facing scarcity?
How about actually doing something to help them, then? By, for example, letting them access your unlimited stuff?
A desire to avoid doing anything that could wreck a scarcity free life?
Like taking impressionable youth and teaching them to value power, then introducing them to the idea of artifical scarcity?
You know teach them to be caring and not self centered.
By making them live in - and be indoctrinated into the values of - a society where selfishness is openly worshipped?
You're missing the fundamental point: We do not understand how the human brain does what it does yet, not even close, and without that fundamental understanding you CANNOT build a machine or write mere software that duplicates it's fuinctionality.
And yet we have made machines which play chess.
They write clever mimicks that only go so far but fall way, WAY short of the mark.
What mark would that be? Human-level ability? Our chess machines are already at the point of beating world champions. 10x human ability? 100x?
There is a hard limit to this until we fully, completely understand how our own brains work.
That doesn't seem to be the case. What our brains excel at is energy and space efficiency, but that's not really relevant for an immobile AI machine fed from the mains power.
Stop buying into all the hype.
Stop being emotional about this. Machines are already superior to humans in physical abilities (as are many animals). There's no reason to assume they won't become superior in intellectual abilities as well. The solution is to stop buying into the lie that human value comes from abilities and usefulness - in other words, abandon the ideal of meritocracy and embrace the ideal of equality of outcome. The alternative is that we're all fucked since machines outperform us at everything and require no pay.
Could you write a program that has free will where you are not able to step the code backward and find exactly why a particular branch was taken? Free will requires a black box that you cannot look inside of. If you can't look inside of it, then does it exist in the universe, ie, is it material?
Well, every quantum system is such a black box, so it certainly exists - for example, measuring a particle's spin along an axis and then subsequently along an orthogonal axis is both easy and gives answers which are, according to current physics, completely random (for the second measurement). But what does that have to do with free will? If I base my decisions on random number generator, in what sense are they "free"? Whereas anyone who knows me can probably predict what I want with reasonable accuracy.
People still hold some vague notion of the soul as a "little man inside you" which is currently shackled to your mortal body but not inherently bound to any rules, not even logic. That's the only framework where thinking (physical) determinism undermines your free will makes sense, but falls apart as soon as you ascribe things like personality - which determines preferences, also known as what you want - to people.
This argument works better adding in a Platonic notion of ideal Forms.
If you recognize an apple by relative approximation to a definitional "apple" model, then one can argue you could not determine what is and is not an apple without the reference entity actually objectively existing.
And indeed it does, in the form of circuits - for lack of a better word - in my brain. But that's not a Platonic Ideal, because your idea of an apple is stored in your brain and is a separate object from mine.
Perhaps the most prominent contemporary proponent of this idea is the philosopher Nick Bostrom.
That the most prominent proponent of a physical theory is a philosopher rather than a scientist or a mathematician seems to suggest that the theory is more popular amongst those who do not have the means to actually evaluate it than those who do.
I think that the primary use of such simulations will be to have "children" (those under the age of 1,000) experience the "bad old days" back when resources were bounded.
Why would you want children to experience scarcity if none exists? What are they going to get from it, aside from various psychological issues, such as compulsive hoarding?
Don't anyone sit there and try to convince me that some cheesy algorithm is going to totally emulate human master composers because that's total and complete bullshit.
Well, either the composer's brains work by magic or they can be emulated by some kind of machine.
Until we have fully human-level artificial intelligence, completely self-aware, with a full complement of human-level emotion and imagination, there won't be any machine-generated art of music that is equivalent to new works by human artists or human composers. Period.
Human beings, and thus human composers, aren't completely self-aware. One of the main weaknessess of human brain is precisely that it lacks general introspection facilities - or "debugger", if you prefer.
I have no idea why Microsoft thinks that their 3D printer app is something special that I would want to use if I had a 3D printer that came with it's own program.
Because if you do, they'll get your model data. It might be resold, it might be data mined for the purposes of machine learning, it might be aggregated for type of object to predict demand for models.
What I witnessed was reality. Sometimes reality is terrible. I wonder if some of these easily offended people would benefit from some wuss shaming. Be a man, faggot!
Or perhaps we would all benefit from having more people too wussy to make the choices which make reality terrible. Because I've witnessed an awful lot of terrible things - such as poverty - being blamed on forces outside human control despite being the direct consequences of choices people make. It's you who should man up and stop being part of the problem, Anon.
All in, I would rather human moderators perhaps with an AI to warn them about extreme content rather that than these incidents being used an an excuse for automated, draconian and potentially politically motivated automatic censorship.
But then again, we're not talking about strong AI here. It can't detect the actual content of a message, only its form. And that means it will succesfully censor all-caps rants and image macros but not arguments delivered in a calm and polite way - because those look like normal talk to the AI. Of course, to make an impact without appeal to anger a political point must be backed with logic and evidence. And as the censorship algorithms evolve, so will people's ability to get around them.
In other words, auto-censorship just might force people to start actually thinking about their politics again rather than treating them like team sport.
BS. A business exists, because it provides service, that people are willing to pay for.
Just out of curiosity, what service do, say, patent trolls provide?
It does not need "society's permission".
It's the society which runs the real estate registry which allows this landlord to have any land to lord over, the monetary system which makes it possible for them to be paid, the law enforcement system which lets them keep breathing despite their actions, etc. You not only need society's permission but its active support to run any kind of business without having to have your own personal army of thugs.
Statist much?
Dunno about him, but I much prefer a strong state, over which I have democratic control in the form of my vote, to plutocratic jungle where my landlord/employer/whatever does shit like this. But perhaps you fancy being one of the overlords.
Obama did the same with his message of hope, change, and transparency, and voters mindlessly ate it up, he was even nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize before he was in office and won it without any accomplishments.
Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for getting Republicans out of power. Isn't that kinda obvious?
The next TV I buy will have to work out of the box because anyone is clearly nuts to plug one of these things into the internet.
If the TV can't connect to the DRM server to check whether it has been reported as stolen, it must assume it is, to prevent a thief from using it. It is for your own protection, honored customer. It's because Samsung cares about you.
Many of us have worked with heavily scripted programs that simulate AI, much like Siri or Google, but they all lack the critical component we often refer to as intuition that makes the difference between a well written script and a possibly intelligent system.
But intuition is merely an artifact of the limitations of human brain, specifically it's incomplete capacity for self-reflection: you aren't aware of most of the processes in your brain, so their results seem to appear out of nowhere. It's just scripts running in a black box.
Slashdot Mirror
Quantum mechanics follows rules, and one of those rules is that measuring a property of a quantum system makes it discard the current value (if any) of the complementary property. The clockwork model of Newtonian physics is simply incorrect; reality actually works in terms of competing possibilities. Or at least that's our current best interpretation of it.
Like I said before, you are such a system, because your personality determines what you want. Your will is part of the universe and its causal chains just as much as the electromagnetic force is, not something external held prisoner by those chains.
To also be blunt: North Korea gets a bad image in media because there's nothing nice about North Korea. It's a country-sized concentration camp led by a succession of particularly nasty dicators who's only interest or competence is taking all power and wealth for themselves.
Kim Whatever is basically the archetypal robber baron elevated to the status of a king.
A prison camp who's warden has his victims build weapons based on technology that's sufficiently outdated everywhere else to be declassified. And they seem to be failing even at that.
Smart enough to notice an obvious shill.
Why would it? Even if some energy is absorbed by air, it's along a hair-thin path, so convection and conduction should keep the temperature well beneath disassociation point.
How are you going to afford access when you're unemployed?
Mod parent up. This has been the major weakness of us on the left for far too long: the willingness to tolerate unethical behaviour or even outright violence in the name of our goal. Soviet Union demonstrated where attempts to build a better world with the power of the dark side will inevitably go, yet some people apparently still think they can use it when it's convenient without having it dominate their destiny. It's time to stop being useful idiots and start building a better tomorrow, not just one where the monster in charge wears our insignia rather than those of our enemies.
To also be very blunt, technical advance doesn't create a bright fututure - or have any impact at all - unless you can get its fruits into the hands of people. And that's pretty difficult to do if they're preoccupied with killing you.
To continue being blunt, Silicon Valley is neither self-sufficient nor a fortress. Should civil order break down, it's not going to be Galt's Gulch, it's going to be a tomb, with the only question being whether the "technical people" get lynched or starve first. And even in the unlikely event that Silicon Valley would emerge more or less intact, with the rest of the country collapsed it won't be able to afford to feed a large population of "technical people" who aren't immediately productive.
And yet more bluntness: civil unrest comes and goes in waves. Sometimes it goes because people get what they wanted, and sometimes because the entire society crumbles and results in another Dark Age. Seeing how what people want typically amounts to bread and circuses, and we have an abundance of both, wouldn't it make more sense to appease the unwashed masses than letting the situation escalate?
Germany is doing well because it's the strongest economy in the Euro which is set up so that wealth flows there from everyone else. Whether that was the plan all along or just the result of economic fundamentalism I can't say, but it's taking the whole EU towards disintegration, at which point Europe will return to being the warzone it used to be - and that means Germany, as the strongest nation here, is going to end up making another error of judgement and subsequently burned to the ground again sooner or later.
In other words, Germany is just as dumb as the rest of them, it just manifests in different ways.
"But that's not a Platonic Ideal, because your idea of an apple is stored in your brain and is a separate object from mine."
No, we don't have the same model of an apple. We both have our own models located in our separate brains. Those models are similar because they were constructed by entities - us - who share almost all of our evolutionary history, about a set of objects - apples - produced by entities - apple trees - which also share almost all of their evolutionary history. While one can speculate about an universal ideal of an apple, such ideal isn't actually necessary to explain the similarities of our models.
Why would it? If you have abundance, and care about this issue enough to traumatize your children over it, surely you'd just use your unbounded resources to uplift that "somewhere else" to your level?
How about actually doing something to help them, then? By, for example, letting them access your unlimited stuff?
Like taking impressionable youth and teaching them to value power, then introducing them to the idea of artifical scarcity?
By making them live in - and be indoctrinated into the values of - a society where selfishness is openly worshipped?
And yet we have made machines which play chess.
What mark would that be? Human-level ability? Our chess machines are already at the point of beating world champions. 10x human ability? 100x?
That doesn't seem to be the case. What our brains excel at is energy and space efficiency, but that's not really relevant for an immobile AI machine fed from the mains power.
Stop being emotional about this. Machines are already superior to humans in physical abilities (as are many animals). There's no reason to assume they won't become superior in intellectual abilities as well. The solution is to stop buying into the lie that human value comes from abilities and usefulness - in other words, abandon the ideal of meritocracy and embrace the ideal of equality of outcome. The alternative is that we're all fucked since machines outperform us at everything and require no pay.
Well, every quantum system is such a black box, so it certainly exists - for example, measuring a particle's spin along an axis and then subsequently along an orthogonal axis is both easy and gives answers which are, according to current physics, completely random (for the second measurement). But what does that have to do with free will? If I base my decisions on random number generator, in what sense are they "free"? Whereas anyone who knows me can probably predict what I want with reasonable accuracy.
People still hold some vague notion of the soul as a "little man inside you" which is currently shackled to your mortal body but not inherently bound to any rules, not even logic. That's the only framework where thinking (physical) determinism undermines your free will makes sense, but falls apart as soon as you ascribe things like personality - which determines preferences, also known as what you want - to people.
And indeed it does, in the form of circuits - for lack of a better word - in my brain. But that's not a Platonic Ideal, because your idea of an apple is stored in your brain and is a separate object from mine.
That the most prominent proponent of a physical theory is a philosopher rather than a scientist or a mathematician seems to suggest that the theory is more popular amongst those who do not have the means to actually evaluate it than those who do.
Why would you want children to experience scarcity if none exists? What are they going to get from it, aside from various psychological issues, such as compulsive hoarding?
Well, either the composer's brains work by magic or they can be emulated by some kind of machine.
Human beings, and thus human composers, aren't completely self-aware. One of the main weaknessess of human brain is precisely that it lacks general introspection facilities - or "debugger", if you prefer.
Because if you do, they'll get your model data. It might be resold, it might be data mined for the purposes of machine learning, it might be aggregated for type of object to predict demand for models.
Or perhaps we would all benefit from having more people too wussy to make the choices which make reality terrible. Because I've witnessed an awful lot of terrible things - such as poverty - being blamed on forces outside human control despite being the direct consequences of choices people make. It's you who should man up and stop being part of the problem, Anon.
But then again, we're not talking about strong AI here. It can't detect the actual content of a message, only its form. And that means it will succesfully censor all-caps rants and image macros but not arguments delivered in a calm and polite way - because those look like normal talk to the AI. Of course, to make an impact without appeal to anger a political point must be backed with logic and evidence. And as the censorship algorithms evolve, so will people's ability to get around them.
In other words, auto-censorship just might force people to start actually thinking about their politics again rather than treating them like team sport.
Just out of curiosity, what service do, say, patent trolls provide?
It's the society which runs the real estate registry which allows this landlord to have any land to lord over, the monetary system which makes it possible for them to be paid, the law enforcement system which lets them keep breathing despite their actions, etc. You not only need society's permission but its active support to run any kind of business without having to have your own personal army of thugs.
Dunno about him, but I much prefer a strong state, over which I have democratic control in the form of my vote, to plutocratic jungle where my landlord/employer/whatever does shit like this. But perhaps you fancy being one of the overlords.
Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for getting Republicans out of power. Isn't that kinda obvious?
If the TV can't connect to the DRM server to check whether it has been reported as stolen, it must assume it is, to prevent a thief from using it. It is for your own protection, honored customer. It's because Samsung cares about you.
What promises does the USA make about the dollar, and what, exactly speaking, can I do if it decides to break them?
But intuition is merely an artifact of the limitations of human brain, specifically it's incomplete capacity for self-reflection: you aren't aware of most of the processes in your brain, so their results seem to appear out of nowhere. It's just scripts running in a black box.
So how will it help you any to have those other men control things directly, especially since they'll just delegate to their AI underlings anyway?
They send the email during their shift, it goes to your mailbox and waits there, and you read it when you come to work?