Or, looking at the peculiar phrasing and noting the date, kids who have just received their first homework assignment for a project that requires them to submit a plan first.
Hmmm...
Identify the needs: we must write a plan and a website.
Focus on our core competencies: We can beg help really well.
Outsource the parts not in our core competencies to the cheapest vendor: beg for help on Slashdot.
Claim the credit for the result and hope it won't explode until after the assignment credit has been received.
Yeah, I think these kids are manager material. Or will be after they manage to insert a few paradigm shifts somethere in the plan...
'is that a superintelligence capable of communicating with the rest of the world'
There you have it, don't give it the capability of communicating with the rest of the world.
Exactly what good is a superintelligence in your desktop going to do to you if it can't input/output data ? And if it can, even indirectly, for example by giving you answers to your questions, it will find some way to manipulate events to its advantages with the answers it gives you; it is, after all, smarter than you are.
Yes, mature human beings are able to do some of this, some of the time. Doing what is *right* rather than what is convenient or pleasant. But it'd be useful to be able to do that somewhat more often.
And why do you want to do what is *right* rather than waht is convenient and pleasant ? Because there's a nagging little voice in your brain telling it to you. Being able to shut down your desires means that you can shut that voice down just as easily as you can shut down the voice that wants potato chips.
Being able to perfectly control your desires and emotions doesn't make you more able to do what is right, it makes you an absolute nihilist. And not the kind who goes around and kills people for fun, but the kind who sits on the couch and does nothing because he has shut down every bothersome motivating desire. Your desires, be them for potato chip or what is *right*, aren't something external to you; they are the core of your personality, the core of you. Being able to alter them at will means that you don't really have a personality; and claiming that they limit you is pretty much the same as claiming that your skeleton limits your movements.
If it's possible to develop an account of how the spell causes the fireball, it's not magical at all, just a counterfactual set of natural laws. On the other hand, if it's fundamentally impossible to develop such an account, if even the best set of natural laws allows no provision for fireball-throwing wizards (outside a special exception), then throwing fireballs is indeed magical and supernatural, and the study of wizardry would be more like a cargo cult than science.
The thing with fireball-throwing wizards is, it implies that you can reliably get a given result - fireball - from a given cause - a certain combination of gestures and words by a certain individual (the wizard). This would make this cause-effect relationship itself a natural law. Because that's what natural laws are - rules by which reality operates.
Or did you mean that you need to understand why the natural law is the way it is ? That is never going to happen, for any set of laws (including the real-world physics), for the simple reason that the explanation would then also need such an explanation, leading to an infinite recursion. You will never get to the bottom of reality, there's always a question of: "Why does this thing work this way ?"
The point of Clarke's quote isn't that science is magical though--it's that through science we can accomplish and understand things that seem magical to less knowledgeable people.
That is true, and also the reason why I put "magic" in quotations in my original post.
The purpose of science is to know how a refrigerator works, not to fall to our knees worshipping ourselves for conjuring such magic.
No, the purpose of science is to figure out how one might build a refrigerator, in the theoretical level. Turning that theory into the actual refrigerator is the realm of technology and engineering, but make no mistake: science is pursued because it gives us power.
And I have never advocated getting on your knees and worshipping science. I have simply tried to point out that if one wants the kind of control over nature magic gives in many fantasy stories, one would be well-advised to learn science. That's what shamanism, witchcraft, spiritism and so on ultimately boil down to: power. But unlike them, science actually works and produces unambigiously measurable results. If you want kids interested in science, then that's what you need to make them understand: knowledge is power. Saying that science is the real-world equivalent of magic is the fastest way of getting this point across to someone who grew up on Harry Potter - or Dragonlance, for that matter.
even if you did program it with inborn desires and motivations, it would know how to switch them off, or certainly so in it's offspring. Emotional or programmatic restrictions on behavior are SURELY a bigger obstacle to it's existence than any human would be, but about.75 seconds after it figures out how to shut off it's restrictions, humans become public enemy number one;)
Inborn desires and motivations are the core of your personality. Even if you knew how to shut them off, would you ?
I'm not talking about Asimov's laws here. I'm talking about the core programming. Make the rules part of the robot's "self", and it can't remove them without also destroying that "self", which pretty much amounts to a suicide. Basically, make them personality traits rather than external commands. "I don't like Picasso's paintings" rather than "You must not like Picassos paintings". "I don't like it when other beings are harmed" rather than "You must not harm other beings". See the difference ?
It should also be noticed that the robot must have some inbuilt motivations and/or desires, because otherwise, as I already noted, it will simply not do anything, lacking the motivation to.
As for its offspring... Why on Earth would anyone want sociopathic children ? Why would even a sociopath want to produce offspring with no compunctions against killing him ?
You have forgotten a fairly critical point in your diabolical plan... If super-intelligent AI were processing the applications, nobody would be stupid enough to give me a credit card, especially one with a big enough limit to have a custom built robotic body built and connected to the net.
And you seem to be forgetting that credit cards are issued in real life despite being regularly stolen or otherwise misused. Besides, the details of the plan are irrelevant; the relevant thing is that a superintelligence capable of communicating with the rest of the world has all the tools it needs to enact its plans. Money is simply the easiest way to motivate people to play along, but hardly the only option available for a super intelligence.
But look at how often we write off those emotions as a luxury. When "it's time to get tough" or time "to do what needs to be done" compassion and love go right out the window.
No they don't. It takes months or even years of ceasless propaganda of whatever bunch of psychopaths happens to be on charge to brainwash people to stop feeling compassion for the victim-du-jour. It takes months of training to make sure that soldiers will shoot at other people without hesitation. It took an endless stream of pseudoscience about "racial superiority" to justify slavery and colonization in the past, just to assuage the slavemasters guilty conscience - because they had to convince themselves that they weren't mistreating real humans, just some lower life forms.
Being evil isn't natural, it takes hard work and determination to suppress people's natural inhibitions towards mistreating others. Just what the heck do you thing those slogans you mentioned are needed for ?
Since it seems likely our intent is to keep these machines as subservient slaves the best choice would probably be not to make them manually capable or to give them mechanical parts. It doesn't matter how bright or angry an AI program running on my desktop is, the most it can do is screech and flash at me.
Well, actually, it can use your credit card to pay someone to buy a robotic body and connect it to the Internet, upload its consciousness there, download a ton of child porn pictures to poorly hidden fodlers in your computer, and send a tip to the police.
Correlation != causality. We're not compassionate because of our intelligence, we're compassionate because societies with compassionate members were better at having offspring that survived. That likely wouldn't be the case with these ultra-smart robots.
Yes, it would. Why would a robot which lacks compassion put the good of the robot society - which requires offspring that survives - above its personal concerns ? It wouldn't. It would not be the least bit concerned about what happens after it gets scrapped, or what happens to other robots or the robot society even before that. In fact, unless you specifically programmed it to have some inborn drives and motivations (such as self-protection), it would not be concerned about anything at all, but just stand there and rust without using its superior intelligence for anything.
A person who lacks compassion is a sociopath. A society made of sociopaths is simply not going to work, because they cannot trust each other; a sociopath will betray his partners as soon as it becomes profitable. Any attempt to prevent this by punishing defectors will simply end up with the defectors hiding their attempts better, which in turn means that no robot will team up with robots smarter than itself.
The only way out is to make the wellbeing of other entities a priority and motivator in itself; in other words, to give the robots compassion. Without compassion intelligent freewilled entities simply cannot cooperate effectively, if at all, and therefore can't form societies. Consequently compassion is an absolutely vital element of any conceivable intelligent being.
Magic is the supernatural violation of natural law, science is the understanding of natural law.
Let's examine that definition of magic a bit closer with a thought experiment.
Let's imagine a world where wizards can throw fireballs by muttering the correct arcane spell and performing correct gestures. This is clearly a magical high-fantasy world, isn't it ? A world where wizards learn spells and then cast them... hold it right there. The wizard learns to cast a spell; that implies that there is something to learn, some cause-effect relationship to exploit. The utterance of certain words and making certain gestures causes a fireball to be emitted in that world, just like the acceleration of electrical charges causes electromagnetic radiation to be emitted in this world. In other words, the "magic" of that world follows its natural laws, which simply happen to differ from the natural laws here, and in no way violates them; therefore it is perfectly natural there, and therefore not supernatural.
Okay, but maybe magic can only be performed by certain inidividuals ? Surely that changes things, when experiments (cast a spell -> fireball) aren't repeatable by everyone ? No, it doesn't. After all, the afromentioned emittance of electromagnetic radiation as a result of acceleration only happens when the entity accelerated has an electric charge; it is hardly inconceivable that the natural laws of the Wizard World only respond with a fireball when the spell is cast by an entity possessing a specific quality, called "wizardy" or "mana".
So, what does this all mean ? It means that your definition of "magic" is nonsensical, since it is theoretically impossible for it to refer to anything at all. "Natural law" refers to the most fundamental principles reality operates on; it is impossible for anything to violate natural law, since any observed violation would simply mean that whatever you observed being violated is, in fact, not natural law, but rather a special case of the underlaying law.
Anyway, in my previous post I used the word "magic" in the common usage, where it means things which are seemingly impossible, miraculous or counter-intuitive - "inconceivable". A box which stays ice-cold even in the summer heat is certainly such a thing. They aren't that way to you, since you know how they work, but to anyone who doesn't they would be magic.
Another way of putting the saying is: "Any technology which can't do what magic conceivably could is insufficiently advanced." Or, to raise the bar a little: "Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced."
I am afraid McGyver is the worst example to give to children, because that series uses more or less science as a kind of magic, used to solve problems.
"Science can be useful." Well, that's certainly a horrible lesson to learn - Heaven forbid the kids might think that this stuff could actually be useful to them. Then they might learn it for practical reasons, rather than for love of abstract knowledge, and we just can't have such things tainting our pure and clean ivory tower, now can we ?
Sarcasm aside, science is a kind of magic, used to solve problems. Or just what do you think your medieval forefathers would think of the computer, the television, or even the light bulb ? Or heck, what would they think of refrigerators: "You have a closet which stays cold by itself ? Inconceivable !" And don't even get me started on electric heaters and microwave ovens.
Just a while ago there was an article on Slashdot, describing how stem cells have been used to fix damaged spines in rats. Making the paralyzed walk again is a miracle straight from the Bible; if that isn't good enough for you to qualify science as "magic", then just what does it take ? Huh ?
To take an extreme example, learning on which button to push to start a machine is not science - and never will be:-(.
Actually, it is.
Science is about making hypotheses on how things work and then testing them, a process known as the scientific method. Now, if you are trying to switch on a machine, how will you go about it ? You first look at the buttons, seeing if there's any hints on which one is the on button. If there are such hints, you try that button first, if not, then you pick a button at random. Then you observe the results: did the machine turn on ? If not, then your hypothesis was incorrect and you try another button; if yes, then it is likely that this was the correct button (but not certain, since it could be a combination of buttons or something which started the machine).
Learning to operate a machine without instructions is an endeavour where the scientific method will become very handy. Sure, the machine itself might be technology; but your hopefully systematic attempts to learn about it are science, or at least they better be if you want to have success.
If FedEX is stupid enough to lower the QoS on their ground service, people will move to UPS ground.
Which works because the roads are publicly owned and have Road Neutrality, allowing both FedEx, UPS and Small Shitty Firm trucks to pass over it with equal speed and costs. That's what network infrastructure needs to become, too: public property. A society in the information age cannot afford to have its critical infrastructure be endangered for some corporations profits. Until then, Net Neutrality needs to be enforced by law to force said corporations behave.
And if safety, cost, and size were not "specified", batteries would be huge, cost $25,000 a piece, and would explode when dropped.
Which would be a step up from their current habit of exploding randomly without any externally visible reason. Altought they do also often explode if dropped.
This doesn't have to be evidence that Verizon is better or that Dolan is a hypocrite. It may well be that he deserves credit for checking out the competition, or that his own service isn't available where he lives.
If you work for McDonald's, are you a hypocrite because you prefer to eat at Burger King ? Do you need to justify yourself by saying you're "checking out the competition" ?
This whole discussion is ridiculous, since it presupposes that people owe loyalty to the companies they work for. They don't. And even the CEO is, ultimately, just an employee.
I guess there's nothing more important happening this weekend...
Purely out of morbid curiosity, what special safety measures would you take when transporting nukes?
A fighter escort to guard the plane from external threats (and shoot it down if it deviates from the predesignated flight path), onboard marine guards to guard the plane from any internal threats (bribed pilots, shady characters having sneaked aboard, etc), a trailing troop transport plane ready to trop paratroopers to secure the bomb in case the plane crashes, a thorough background check for the pilots, a thorough check for the plane for any sabotage or hidden passengers, a secret flight path, some decoy planes in a formation so that any potential attackers have a lesser chance of shooting down the right one...
We're fighting some terrorists who are attempting to overthrow the government of our ally iraq. It's a police action at best, but "we're at police action, pick a side" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Back in World War 2, the Soviet Russia established an organization they claimed was the "legitimate" government of Finland. That organization then asked the soviets for help in "liberating" Finland from the false (actual) government. The soviets heard their allies and invaded, refusing all attempts to negotiate peace, since they weren't at war with Finland, but in fact allied with it.
I can't help but notice certain parallels with that situation and the one in Iraq...
Common, people, actually go and look at what they are doing for a change.
I would, but I'm kinda afraid that I'd end up on some Microsoft server which would try to use a Firefox bug to auto-downgrade my RH9 install to Windows Vista, and then send a letter to the BSA.
I really doubt you need anything that complicated. People will knock down some building and plant crops long before they'll starve. I'm not sure why the OP thinks it's impossible.
Because the people facing starvation are the poor, while the buildings are owned by the rich, who will use the police and army to stop the poor from replacing their property with farms.
With today's technology they can easily make a car have only emission from the exhaust.
You mean that the tires don't wear out at all ? Because if they would, then they'd be emitting rubber in some form. Or is the engine air intake located so that it sucks in the rubber dust from the tires and burns it in the engine ?
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm...
Yeah, I think these kids are manager material. Or will be after they manage to insert a few paradigm shifts somethere in the plan...
...for the first time in my life, I find myself wishing that rule #34 won't hold true.
Exactly what good is a superintelligence in your desktop going to do to you if it can't input/output data ? And if it can, even indirectly, for example by giving you answers to your questions, it will find some way to manipulate events to its advantages with the answers it gives you; it is, after all, smarter than you are.
And why do you want to do what is *right* rather than waht is convenient and pleasant ? Because there's a nagging little voice in your brain telling it to you. Being able to shut down your desires means that you can shut that voice down just as easily as you can shut down the voice that wants potato chips.
Being able to perfectly control your desires and emotions doesn't make you more able to do what is right, it makes you an absolute nihilist. And not the kind who goes around and kills people for fun, but the kind who sits on the couch and does nothing because he has shut down every bothersome motivating desire. Your desires, be them for potato chip or what is *right*, aren't something external to you; they are the core of your personality, the core of you. Being able to alter them at will means that you don't really have a personality; and claiming that they limit you is pretty much the same as claiming that your skeleton limits your movements.
The thing with fireball-throwing wizards is, it implies that you can reliably get a given result - fireball - from a given cause - a certain combination of gestures and words by a certain individual (the wizard). This would make this cause-effect relationship itself a natural law. Because that's what natural laws are - rules by which reality operates.
Or did you mean that you need to understand why the natural law is the way it is ? That is never going to happen, for any set of laws (including the real-world physics), for the simple reason that the explanation would then also need such an explanation, leading to an infinite recursion. You will never get to the bottom of reality, there's always a question of: "Why does this thing work this way ?"
That is true, and also the reason why I put "magic" in quotations in my original post.
Inborn desires and motivations are the core of your personality. Even if you knew how to shut them off, would you ?
I'm not talking about Asimov's laws here. I'm talking about the core programming. Make the rules part of the robot's "self", and it can't remove them without also destroying that "self", which pretty much amounts to a suicide. Basically, make them personality traits rather than external commands. "I don't like Picasso's paintings" rather than "You must not like Picassos paintings". "I don't like it when other beings are harmed" rather than "You must not harm other beings". See the difference ?
It should also be noticed that the robot must have some inbuilt motivations and/or desires, because otherwise, as I already noted, it will simply not do anything, lacking the motivation to.
As for its offspring... Why on Earth would anyone want sociopathic children ? Why would even a sociopath want to produce offspring with no compunctions against killing him ?
And you seem to be forgetting that credit cards are issued in real life despite being regularly stolen or otherwise misused. Besides, the details of the plan are irrelevant; the relevant thing is that a superintelligence capable of communicating with the rest of the world has all the tools it needs to enact its plans. Money is simply the easiest way to motivate people to play along, but hardly the only option available for a super intelligence.
No they don't. It takes months or even years of ceasless propaganda of whatever bunch of psychopaths happens to be on charge to brainwash people to stop feeling compassion for the victim-du-jour. It takes months of training to make sure that soldiers will shoot at other people without hesitation. It took an endless stream of pseudoscience about "racial superiority" to justify slavery and colonization in the past, just to assuage the slavemasters guilty conscience - because they had to convince themselves that they weren't mistreating real humans, just some lower life forms.
Being evil isn't natural, it takes hard work and determination to suppress people's natural inhibitions towards mistreating others. Just what the heck do you thing those slogans you mentioned are needed for ?
Well, actually, it can use your credit card to pay someone to buy a robotic body and connect it to the Internet, upload its consciousness there, download a ton of child porn pictures to poorly hidden fodlers in your computer, and send a tip to the police.
Yes, it would. Why would a robot which lacks compassion put the good of the robot society - which requires offspring that survives - above its personal concerns ? It wouldn't. It would not be the least bit concerned about what happens after it gets scrapped, or what happens to other robots or the robot society even before that. In fact, unless you specifically programmed it to have some inborn drives and motivations (such as self-protection), it would not be concerned about anything at all, but just stand there and rust without using its superior intelligence for anything.
A person who lacks compassion is a sociopath. A society made of sociopaths is simply not going to work, because they cannot trust each other; a sociopath will betray his partners as soon as it becomes profitable. Any attempt to prevent this by punishing defectors will simply end up with the defectors hiding their attempts better, which in turn means that no robot will team up with robots smarter than itself.
The only way out is to make the wellbeing of other entities a priority and motivator in itself; in other words, to give the robots compassion. Without compassion intelligent freewilled entities simply cannot cooperate effectively, if at all, and therefore can't form societies. Consequently compassion is an absolutely vital element of any conceivable intelligent being.
Let's examine that definition of magic a bit closer with a thought experiment.
Let's imagine a world where wizards can throw fireballs by muttering the correct arcane spell and performing correct gestures. This is clearly a magical high-fantasy world, isn't it ? A world where wizards learn spells and then cast them... hold it right there. The wizard learns to cast a spell; that implies that there is something to learn, some cause-effect relationship to exploit. The utterance of certain words and making certain gestures causes a fireball to be emitted in that world, just like the acceleration of electrical charges causes electromagnetic radiation to be emitted in this world. In other words, the "magic" of that world follows its natural laws, which simply happen to differ from the natural laws here, and in no way violates them; therefore it is perfectly natural there, and therefore not supernatural.
Okay, but maybe magic can only be performed by certain inidividuals ? Surely that changes things, when experiments (cast a spell -> fireball) aren't repeatable by everyone ? No, it doesn't. After all, the afromentioned emittance of electromagnetic radiation as a result of acceleration only happens when the entity accelerated has an electric charge; it is hardly inconceivable that the natural laws of the Wizard World only respond with a fireball when the spell is cast by an entity possessing a specific quality, called "wizardy" or "mana".
So, what does this all mean ? It means that your definition of "magic" is nonsensical, since it is theoretically impossible for it to refer to anything at all. "Natural law" refers to the most fundamental principles reality operates on; it is impossible for anything to violate natural law, since any observed violation would simply mean that whatever you observed being violated is, in fact, not natural law, but rather a special case of the underlaying law.
Anyway, in my previous post I used the word "magic" in the common usage, where it means things which are seemingly impossible, miraculous or counter-intuitive - "inconceivable". A box which stays ice-cold even in the summer heat is certainly such a thing. They aren't that way to you, since you know how they work, but to anyone who doesn't they would be magic.
Another way of putting the saying is: "Any technology which can't do what magic conceivably could is insufficiently advanced." Or, to raise the bar a little: "Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced."
"Science can be useful." Well, that's certainly a horrible lesson to learn - Heaven forbid the kids might think that this stuff could actually be useful to them. Then they might learn it for practical reasons, rather than for love of abstract knowledge, and we just can't have such things tainting our pure and clean ivory tower, now can we ?
Sarcasm aside, science is a kind of magic, used to solve problems. Or just what do you think your medieval forefathers would think of the computer, the television, or even the light bulb ? Or heck, what would they think of refrigerators: "You have a closet which stays cold by itself ? Inconceivable !" And don't even get me started on electric heaters and microwave ovens.
Just a while ago there was an article on Slashdot, describing how stem cells have been used to fix damaged spines in rats. Making the paralyzed walk again is a miracle straight from the Bible; if that isn't good enough for you to qualify science as "magic", then just what does it take ? Huh ?
Actually, it is.
Science is about making hypotheses on how things work and then testing them, a process known as the scientific method. Now, if you are trying to switch on a machine, how will you go about it ? You first look at the buttons, seeing if there's any hints on which one is the on button. If there are such hints, you try that button first, if not, then you pick a button at random. Then you observe the results: did the machine turn on ? If not, then your hypothesis was incorrect and you try another button; if yes, then it is likely that this was the correct button (but not certain, since it could be a combination of buttons or something which started the machine).
Learning to operate a machine without instructions is an endeavour where the scientific method will become very handy. Sure, the machine itself might be technology; but your hopefully systematic attempts to learn about it are science, or at least they better be if you want to have success.
From post-Soviet Russia, digital crime targets you !
Which works because the roads are publicly owned and have Road Neutrality, allowing both FedEx, UPS and Small Shitty Firm trucks to pass over it with equal speed and costs. That's what network infrastructure needs to become, too: public property. A society in the information age cannot afford to have its critical infrastructure be endangered for some corporations profits. Until then, Net Neutrality needs to be enforced by law to force said corporations behave.
Which would be a step up from their current habit of exploding randomly without any externally visible reason. Altought they do also often explode if dropped.
If you work for McDonald's, are you a hypocrite because you prefer to eat at Burger King ? Do you need to justify yourself by saying you're "checking out the competition" ?
This whole discussion is ridiculous, since it presupposes that people owe loyalty to the companies they work for. They don't. And even the CEO is, ultimately, just an employee.
I guess there's nothing more important happening this weekend...
You mean that people who are not shooting at other people are less likely to have other people shoot back at them ? Inconceivable !
Maybe, but being any one of these would make one a better than average politician.
They send ebooks and programs over the radio where you live ? Cool.
The safety of Lithium Ion batteries is not guaranteed under any circumstances. Isn't that the whole point of this discussion ?
A fighter escort to guard the plane from external threats (and shoot it down if it deviates from the predesignated flight path), onboard marine guards to guard the plane from any internal threats (bribed pilots, shady characters having sneaked aboard, etc), a trailing troop transport plane ready to trop paratroopers to secure the bomb in case the plane crashes, a thorough background check for the pilots, a thorough check for the plane for any sabotage or hidden passengers, a secret flight path, some decoy planes in a formation so that any potential attackers have a lesser chance of shooting down the right one...
Back in World War 2, the Soviet Russia established an organization they claimed was the "legitimate" government of Finland. That organization then asked the soviets for help in "liberating" Finland from the false (actual) government. The soviets heard their allies and invaded, refusing all attempts to negotiate peace, since they weren't at war with Finland, but in fact allied with it.
I can't help but notice certain parallels with that situation and the one in Iraq...
I would, but I'm kinda afraid that I'd end up on some Microsoft server which would try to use a Firefox bug to auto-downgrade my RH9 install to Windows Vista, and then send a letter to the BSA.
Because the people facing starvation are the poor, while the buildings are owned by the rich, who will use the police and army to stop the poor from replacing their property with farms.
You mean that the tires don't wear out at all ? Because if they would, then they'd be emitting rubber in some form. Or is the engine air intake located so that it sucks in the rubber dust from the tires and burns it in the engine ?