For a corporation to lack a conscience, it has to have CxOs without consciences.
Wrong. It's entirely possible to have an organization made entirely of normal people, yet have it behave in ways that are normally deserved for cartoony supervillainy. The trick is to make every member of the organization think that he's just doing his duty, just doing his job, just following orders.
This is what "banality of evil" really means: it doesn't take malice or greed to do evil, simple passive cowardice is quite sufficient.
Sorry, but dude, if people are THAT gullible and witless that they trust their child's LIFE to the pronouncements of Jenny McCarthy and Oprah....well, they probably were going to have trouble making it across the street alive too.
And that would be all fine and good if they were the ones who paid the price. But they aren't. It's their kids who'll be/have been hit by this. It's not their lives they are screwing over by being stupid; no, they are harming people who are just as entitled to the protection of law as anyone else is. That is the problem.
Then again, there's not much that can be done about this. You could make vaccinations mandatory, but that would set a really nasty precedent. You could declare parents who refuse to take vaccinations for their kids incompetent, but that would set an even nastier one. You could increase education, especially of important subjects such as human biology, but you can't force people to learn or think.
Meaning what, exactly speaking? What is this "cogito" you're talking about and how does it differ from "mere" data processing?
We don't know. We don't have even the faintest beginnings of a "theory of intelligence".
Yes we do. We have a whole branch of science concerning the matter. Which is precisely why I asked: the grandparent post sounds suspiciously like semi-mystical pseudophilosophy that gets thrown around because people don't actually want to know how their minds work and prefer to think them as magical. Which is all fine and good, but gets in the way when talking about related fields, such as AI.
Which doesn't mean that you can just ignore it, start throwing data at simplistic machines and expect (strong) AI to just happen.
No, but you can throw data at a sufficiently complex machine and expect it to learn. That's how humans acquire their initial working knowledge of the world.
Semantics is all fluffy and stuff, but you are nowhere near AI until the computer can actually comprehend meaning.
It already is. A hard drive controller comprehends the meaning of alternating magnetic patterns on the disk: a sequence of ones and zeroes. A processor comprehends a higher-level meaning: a stream of assembly instructions. An operating system comprehends the yet higher level of meaning: a page of code belonging to firefox.exe that was just swapped in and began executing.
This phenomenom should be quite familiar with humans, too. Most communications have multiple levels of meaning, sometimes unrealized even by the originator of the message himself (for example, when you don't realize what something you're telling someone else implies). Computers are simply not smart enough yet to reach what we usually consider the "core" of the message.
Semantics is just yet another buzzword for 'dead data, somewhat organized, but still dead, which we hope will make AI.
"Dead" data, as opposed to what?
Building larger or better organized datasets will get us nowhere if we can not put the initial 'cogito, ergo sum' into the machine.
Meaning what, exactly speaking? What is this "cogito" you're talking about and how does it differ from "mere" data processing?
The defining characteristic of life is the fact that data has meaning to a it. What will it take to spark that in a computer?
Any automatic system relies on finding "meaning" from data. And we already have quite complex automated systems. So, I'd say it's simply a matter of overall complexity whether we'd call something alive or not.
What I don't understand is people who got wiped out in Katrina, got paid, and then used their money to move back in. If someone hands you a check, take it and run like a motherfucker!
Indeed. After all New Orleans is catastrophically flooded once per year, or a total of 5 times since Hurricane Katrina. Clearly it would be perfectly rational to base your actions on this extremely common occurrence and move to some other location which never experiences disaster of any kind, leaving your home, friends and job behind.
No, it IS the war. It just isn't about militaries fighting it out on a battlefield; it is about governments and free citizens fighting over the rights of man.
And while the "free citizens" are fighting the scarecrow, their corporate masters are tightening their fist one squeeze at the time.
The true enemy sits in the boardroom; the lackey in the White House is simply not important.
Well, if people could actually own their houses, their costs would be much lower when they retire. My mother "bought" an average house, but still has to pay about $400 a month in taxes (i.e. rent to the state).
Does your mother guard her house and other possessions with a shotgun in hand? Maintain the roads leading there? Maintain the electric grid, water and sewage systems? Keep a few cruiser missiles handy to defend against invading armies? Enforce zoning and pollution controls to keep someone from building a smoke-belching factory right next to her house? Maintain her own currency system to trade with her local grocers?
I know that it sounds like a lot of money, but it may not actually be that bad, depending on what, exactly, is included in that budget.
Mainly bonuses to the CEOs of corporations doing the work, judging by the past. Giving public money to private individuals is only bad when those individuals are poor.
The whole point of it, and the part that we can no comprehend, is that you do not experience non-existence. By definition you no-experience non-existence because one of its features is the absence of experience.
Ever been unconscious? Remember that brief flash of darkness? That's what it's like when your brain shuts down. You don't think, you don't feel, you don't remember, you don't comprehend you don't see or hear or even notice the passage of time - but you most certainly experience nothingness. Which, of course, isn't "agony" since the brain circuits necessary to feel agony or even mild annoyance have shut down.
If you want an afterlife, you prove it. You can't rest on that it hasn't been disproven, because I can always make a more outrageous claim that you haven't yet falsified. I could claim right now that there's a Starbucks on Jupiter. Prove me wrong.
As it happens, there are possible histories that would result in there being a Starbucks on Jupiter. Since these histories are possible - that is, they can't be ruled out based on what I know about the world - I can't conclude with certainty that there is no Starbucks on Jupiter. I can only calculate - or, more realistically, guestimate - the probability and note that it is very low. In fact, it is so low that it usually makes sense to simply treat it - and other very low probabilities - as zero, as this allows decision-making processes to be optimized tremendously and I only have finite processing power.
I really wish people stopped treating science as a club to beat other people into submission. Not only does it tend to generate backlashes, but it also dulls one's understanding of these points, and recognizing what beliefs are actually supported by evidence and how well is the very edge of science - such recognition has been the key element of every scientific revolution.
For such a dramatic claim that would uproot a lot of science and belief systems, there better be more than some compelling evidence, and it better be independent of belief systems.
This is an impossible requirement. The very act of experiment rests on at least the assumptions that you have managed to eliminate all the external factors, and that you really did perform the experiment and not, say, dream of it - indeed, since Last Thursdayism is not disprovable, trusting any prior knowledge requires a belief system.
mercury and mars, have varying atmospheric or environmental conditions shaping them. there is a reason why they are that flat, and uniform. there is something grinding the stones to sand.
The temperature difference between night and day grind moonstones to dust. So do the very meteor collisions you mentioned. And lack of tectonic or volcanic activity means there's no new mountains being rised, so of course the end result is a flat, dust-filled world.
When a 65 year old American coal miner will face another 5 years of going down in the mine, or an unempolyed 59 year old is facing another 11 years of poverty I wonder how many of them will still think they're "doing better than the French".
All of them. What else can they do? What else can they draw comfort from?
Delusions are a poor man's opium. Get people to think they're doing better than someone else, and they delude themselves to thinking they're doing well. Make them think that Government and socialism are evil, and you can get them to vote against their own bests interests. And keep feeding them the lifes of rich and famous, and make them think "that could be me someday", and they stop thinking how to improve the lifes of the poor which they are.
Anyway, I have had a Bulgarian digital ID for nearly 4 years now. It is privately run - there are several companies which have been licensed to issue the certificates and they issue certs/smartcards to individuals and businesses. The govmint has nothing to do with it besides being obliged by law to accept a smartcard signed electronic document as a valid signature in any form of communication.
These facts, when combined, make me uneasy. Who bears the responsibility if a private ID issuer makes a mistake and gives and ID in your name to a fraudster?
This will inevitably lead to a new brand of vodka advertised as being made with "14 million year old, subglacial, super-oxygenated water".
Vodka is just water and alcohol and is consequently only drunk to get drunk. Who's stupid enough to care for brand, rather than simply getting most alcohol per buck?
If the 'experts' claim that gravity makes apples fly up in the air from the ground to the branches of trees, then anyone can do an experiment to verify or disprove that. So why should we care what they think?
Well, an expert might have something relevant to add to the conversation, rather than making up a fictitious story about experts talking of floating apples on the apparent belief that this somehow reflects badly on actual experts.
What? You don't think the fact that we write mythologies and philosophy at all makes us special among animals?
No, because we learned to write before we wrote mythology and philosophy:p
No, it's the fact that we write mythologies and philosophy that distinguishes us from other apes. And that gulf is vast.
Who's this "we" you're talking about? I have written (bad) fanfiction, which is a form of mythology. Have you done so?
Snark aside, I think you're in the right track here. Human language is very abstract, and human mind naturally needs to be capable of handling that abstraction. This has a nice side effect of allowing imagination (needed to comprehend incoming communication), planning (once you can imagine things, you can imagine the probable results of actions), and culture (one person communicates his imagination to another, who adds stuff and passes it to a third one, and so on).
Of course, all this means that human mind is so flexible because it's self-modifying code running in a virtual machine, while animal minds run close to the metal. I simply must point this out in the next C(++) vs. high-level languages debate >:).
No we can't. That's pure speculation. In fact, it's not so much the size of the brain that matters, but the structure.
All mammals have basically the same brain structure. It only differs in relative size of areas. And in any case, saying that it's the structure that matters says nothing about whether some particular structure might produce intelligence or not.
There are some examples of gorillas learning sign language and having reasonably intelligent discussions with their handlers; they could learn about 500 words, if memory serves.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. It's entirely possible to have an organization made entirely of normal people, yet have it behave in ways that are normally deserved for cartoony supervillainy. The trick is to make every member of the organization think that he's just doing his duty, just doing his job, just following orders.
This is what "banality of evil" really means: it doesn't take malice or greed to do evil, simple passive cowardice is quite sufficient.
And that would be all fine and good if they were the ones who paid the price. But they aren't. It's their kids who'll be/have been hit by this. It's not their lives they are screwing over by being stupid; no, they are harming people who are just as entitled to the protection of law as anyone else is. That is the problem.
Then again, there's not much that can be done about this. You could make vaccinations mandatory, but that would set a really nasty precedent. You could declare parents who refuse to take vaccinations for their kids incompetent, but that would set an even nastier one. You could increase education, especially of important subjects such as human biology, but you can't force people to learn or think.
Yes we do. We have a whole branch of science concerning the matter. Which is precisely why I asked: the grandparent post sounds suspiciously like semi-mystical pseudophilosophy that gets thrown around because people don't actually want to know how their minds work and prefer to think them as magical. Which is all fine and good, but gets in the way when talking about related fields, such as AI.
No, but you can throw data at a sufficiently complex machine and expect it to learn. That's how humans acquire their initial working knowledge of the world.
Your brain is a clockwork mechanism, yet it somehow manages to be "smart", or at least appears that way to you.
It's been done already, and the resulting AI was good enough to get three papers submitted to a computer science conference.
It already is. A hard drive controller comprehends the meaning of alternating magnetic patterns on the disk: a sequence of ones and zeroes. A processor comprehends a higher-level meaning: a stream of assembly instructions. An operating system comprehends the yet higher level of meaning: a page of code belonging to firefox.exe that was just swapped in and began executing.
This phenomenom should be quite familiar with humans, too. Most communications have multiple levels of meaning, sometimes unrealized even by the originator of the message himself (for example, when you don't realize what something you're telling someone else implies). Computers are simply not smart enough yet to reach what we usually consider the "core" of the message.
"Dead" data, as opposed to what?
Meaning what, exactly speaking? What is this "cogito" you're talking about and how does it differ from "mere" data processing?
Any automatic system relies on finding "meaning" from data. And we already have quite complex automated systems. So, I'd say it's simply a matter of overall complexity whether we'd call something alive or not.
Wouldn't it make more sense to simply point it to Wikipedia?
Doesn't work on Windows either. And why would embedded fonts be platform-dependent anyway? Don't PDF renderers do document rendering internally?
I suspect that the PDF files are simply faulty.
Indeed. After all New Orleans is catastrophically flooded once per year, or a total of 5 times since Hurricane Katrina. Clearly it would be perfectly rational to base your actions on this extremely common occurrence and move to some other location which never experiences disaster of any kind, leaving your home, friends and job behind.
And while the "free citizens" are fighting the scarecrow, their corporate masters are tightening their fist one squeeze at the time.
The true enemy sits in the boardroom; the lackey in the White House is simply not important.
Does your mother guard her house and other possessions with a shotgun in hand? Maintain the roads leading there? Maintain the electric grid, water and sewage systems? Keep a few cruiser missiles handy to defend against invading armies? Enforce zoning and pollution controls to keep someone from building a smoke-belching factory right next to her house? Maintain her own currency system to trade with her local grocers?
She gets off cheap.
Mainly bonuses to the CEOs of corporations doing the work, judging by the past. Giving public money to private individuals is only bad when those individuals are poor.
Can you rig an alarm to ring if he starts moving? You know, to act as an early warning system against a zombie apocalypse?
Ever been unconscious? Remember that brief flash of darkness? That's what it's like when your brain shuts down. You don't think, you don't feel, you don't remember, you don't comprehend you don't see or hear or even notice the passage of time - but you most certainly experience nothingness. Which, of course, isn't "agony" since the brain circuits necessary to feel agony or even mild annoyance have shut down.
As it happens, there are possible histories that would result in there being a Starbucks on Jupiter. Since these histories are possible - that is, they can't be ruled out based on what I know about the world - I can't conclude with certainty that there is no Starbucks on Jupiter. I can only calculate - or, more realistically, guestimate - the probability and note that it is very low. In fact, it is so low that it usually makes sense to simply treat it - and other very low probabilities - as zero, as this allows decision-making processes to be optimized tremendously and I only have finite processing power.
I really wish people stopped treating science as a club to beat other people into submission. Not only does it tend to generate backlashes, but it also dulls one's understanding of these points, and recognizing what beliefs are actually supported by evidence and how well is the very edge of science - such recognition has been the key element of every scientific revolution.
This is an impossible requirement. The very act of experiment rests on at least the assumptions that you have managed to eliminate all the external factors, and that you really did perform the experiment and not, say, dream of it - indeed, since Last Thursdayism is not disprovable, trusting any prior knowledge requires a belief system.
The temperature difference between night and day grind moonstones to dust. So do the very meteor collisions you mentioned. And lack of tectonic or volcanic activity means there's no new mountains being rised, so of course the end result is a flat, dust-filled world.
All of them. What else can they do? What else can they draw comfort from?
Delusions are a poor man's opium. Get people to think they're doing better than someone else, and they delude themselves to thinking they're doing well. Make them think that Government and socialism are evil, and you can get them to vote against their own bests interests. And keep feeding them the lifes of rich and famous, and make them think "that could be me someday", and they stop thinking how to improve the lifes of the poor which they are.
These facts, when combined, make me uneasy. Who bears the responsibility if a private ID issuer makes a mistake and gives and ID in your name to a fraudster?
So did Franz Reichelt.
How the heck did a discussion about a frozen lake beneath Antarctica veer into you bragging about coaching President Obama?
Vodka is just water and alcohol and is consequently only drunk to get drunk. Who's stupid enough to care for brand, rather than simply getting most alcohol per buck?
If there is a temple down there, then neither of those pussies dare go there for fear of shoggoths.
Well, an expert might have something relevant to add to the conversation, rather than making up a fictitious story about experts talking of floating apples on the apparent belief that this somehow reflects badly on actual experts.
As it happens, there are humans with echolocation.
No, because we learned to write before we wrote mythology and philosophy :p
Who's this "we" you're talking about? I have written (bad) fanfiction, which is a form of mythology. Have you done so?
Snark aside, I think you're in the right track here. Human language is very abstract, and human mind naturally needs to be capable of handling that abstraction. This has a nice side effect of allowing imagination (needed to comprehend incoming communication), planning (once you can imagine things, you can imagine the probable results of actions), and culture (one person communicates his imagination to another, who adds stuff and passes it to a third one, and so on).
Of course, all this means that human mind is so flexible because it's self-modifying code running in a virtual machine, while animal minds run close to the metal. I simply must point this out in the next C(++) vs. high-level languages debate >:).
All mammals have basically the same brain structure. It only differs in relative size of areas. And in any case, saying that it's the structure that matters says nothing about whether some particular structure might produce intelligence or not.
There are some examples of gorillas learning sign language and having reasonably intelligent discussions with their handlers; they could learn about 500 words, if memory serves.