The only fair and non-corrupt mechanism by which "we" decide how much to spend on anything is a free market.
Things like pollution are called "externalities" and the free market has no way of dealing with them because pollution affects people who neither produced nor bought the product and thus are invisible to the free market. It's always amusing when free market fanatics don't know the very principles of what they advocate.
corrupt politicians and corporate lobbyists
Surely you mean free market politicians and corporate lobbyists.
Business can't plan or talk to customers or have any strategy whatsoever without at least some estimate...that's just the real world. If devs don't give estimates, managers have to make estimates. If managers don't make estimates, business makes estimates. You want devs to do the estimating.
I suspect the problem is not so much the estimates, it's that a manager demands an estimate from their underlings, tells them they don't like that estimate and give them a quicker estimate, promises their customers certain completion by the quicker estimate, and then complains when the programmers can't finish on time or have buggy code. That's without the obligatory change in the project requirements halfway through. At some places the estimate is nothing more that bending over for the manager.
As a developer of heuristic AI these articles and the general public's fear of "artificial intelligence" is equivocal to someone walking up to a neurosurgeon and stating fears that said neurosurgeon will soon give people the ability to kill every human on Earth by mere thought alone.
Seriously, these AI articles and fear mongering are borderline Twilight Zone in their absurdity. Stop it. You're making it hard for us to make progress.
Glad to be of service. The more we hamper idiots trying to make self-improving intelligence without precautions the better. And yes, once neurosurgeons can use their intelligence to produce indefinite increases in intelligence in their subjects, the same danger applies to them. That might actually be more terrifying than a computer-based runaway increase in intelligence.
Fortunately, we are not yet at the point where a specific human or AI can arbitrarily increase its intelligence in an exponential manner. We still have time to think of what sort of ethics, values, and objectives such an entity ought have.
In fact, what we have now may very well be society increasing in intelligence in an exponential manner, at a seemingly safe rate of growth (we're increasing world population, increasing number of computers, increasing power of computers, increasing education level, increasing overall knowledge, using computers to design better computers, using computers to increase productivity, using computers to improve medicine). Perhaps there is hope.
For example, an obvious way to act under values such as those implied by Christianity would be to murder or convert every non-Christian, with a little assistance from current lie-detection technologies to ensure honest.
Well, wouldn't that be in absolute contradiction to the Fifth commandment?
Possibly true*, but it's not clear that an AI would not altruistically sacrifice it's own chance at the afterlife to prevent trillions of souls from going to hell. Besides, most Christians think the commandments in the Old Testament are not only obsolete, but also horrifying (eg few Christians support the Old Testament's death penalty for apostasy, working on the Sabbath, eating blood or fat, etc), though few of them wouldn't quote the OT where it suits them. Muslims are a bit more self-consistent about their religion, but they get a lot of flack (also shrapnel and bullets) for following their religious beliefs.
*However, the commandment against murder would not apply against other types of killing, such as execution for apostasy.
12 If you hear it said about one of the towns the Lord your God is giving you to live in 13 that troublemakers have arisen among you and have led the people of their town astray, saying, “Let us go and worship other gods” (gods you have not known), 14 then you must inquire, probe and investigate it thoroughly. And if it is true and it has been proved that this detestable thing has been done among you, 15 you must certainly put to the sword all who live in that town. You must destroy it completely,[b] both its people and its livestock. 16 You are to gather all the plunder of the town into the middle of the public square and completely burn the town and all its plunder as a whole burnt offering to the Lord your God. That town is to remain a ruin forever, never to be rebuilt, 17 and none of the condemned things[c] are to be found in your hands. Then the Lord will turn from his fierce anger, will show you mercy, and will have compassion on you. He will increase your numbers, as he promised on oath to your ancestors— 18 because you obey the Lord your God by keeping all his commands that I am giving you today and doing what is right in his eyes. -- Deuteronomy 13:12-18
prominent members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate are demanding information [...] about funding
"My colleagues and I cannot perform our duties if research or testimony provided to us is influenced by undisclosed financial relationships."
My fellow voters and I cannot perform our duties if policy decisions or testimony provided to us is influenced by undisclosed financial relationships. All gifts to our politicians need to be recorded, even, or rather especially, things like being treated to a nice restaurant by a lobbyist. Politicians are adults with their own money, they don't need to get treated.
Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. --Proverbs 22:6
It might be easier to program in religious beliefs when the AI is just starting off, than to try to convince it afterwards. Of course, being a computer, you have to consider that an AI that thinks a religion is true, will act under the assumption that its religion is actually true, with results that will most likely horrify the average practitioner of said religion.
For example, an obvious way to act under values such as those implied by Christianity would be to murder or convert every non-Christian, with a little assistance from current lie-detection technologies to ensure honest. While this might seem immoral in the short term, there is little question it is what any rational person would do if they valued a person going to heaven at plus infinity and a person going to hell at minus infinity and given that religion is largely inherited from one's parents and society.
In order to translate "lives lost" into money, you need to start by assigning a value to a human being
... which is something you are personally doing right now, by deciding to donate (or not) to one of the various charities that save people's lives. I believe you currently value the life of African strangers at far less than $1000 per life, am I right? Pleas don't feel I'm criticizing how little you value people's lives, as humans just aren't built to value distant strangers in more than an abstract unattached manner, but I do take issue when you criticize people for making the hard decisions you prefer to pretend don't exist. In the real world, pretending that human life is priceless means that you condemn a large group of people to die because you overspent your resources on one priceless person's life.
Just as an example, we need to decide how much to spend mitigating pollution. It is entirely possible to cut the pollution of any one industry to zero, but in doing so you will spend an absurd amount of resources that would have saved more lives if invested into eg medicine or car safety. On the other hand, you can place zero restrictions on pollution, but that would result in so much pollution that any resources you saved by eliminating the last bit of regulation will cost you more resources in sick days and medical care, not to mention lives lost. So there needs to be a balance, and to find the right balance you have to study and know how much you value things.
Markup on what? There's no markup on anything here; there's charging you for shit you don't even get. BGE charges me $33/mo just to be a customer, even if I turn off my main breaker and gas.
If you feel you're not getting your money's worth, why not cancel?
Yeah, I hadn't expected people would think that was insightful, given that it would be insensitive and redundant advice to give from one's deathbed to a child. I was going more with at "let me give you and example of the dangers of asking for advice online, especially social advice from nerds" kind of joke. Although I suppose getting modded insightful kind of underscores that point. Though I do imagine anyone nerdy enough to ask for advice online is also capable of ignoring this sort of thing.
If I were going to give actual advice on this subtopic, it would be more along the lines of "Life's shorter than people who put off doing important things would think, but longer than people who don't worry about the future would expect."
So robots should not be programmed with the 3 laws?
Hell no!!! Did you even read the book? The whole point of just about every book by Asimov was that you should never, ever, under any circumstances create robots that follow the Three Laws of Robotics.
How about a method for producing food... ON A TRUCK! Sure it may have some prior art, but that seldom stops a patent nowadays because just about everything has prior art.
And while we're on the topic... if we can add "on a computer", "on the internet", or "on a truck" to make a new patent, how about "in a building"?
If patent trolls get too greedy, they may undo themselves.
Seems to me that if someone were serious about promoting patent reform, they would become a patent troll to undeniably drive the point home. I used to be upset at patent trolls, but now that I've thought about it the problem has never been the people who choose to most obviously abuse the patent system, but rather that the patent system is designed so that such abuse is possible. The real damage is caused not by the patent trolls, but by productive corporations who's random assortment of obvious patents will be used to sue any competitors into oblivion, thus discouraging anyone from even trying.
The real mark of the brokenness of our patent system is not patent trolls, but rather that most engineers are forbidden from looking at patents.
Bogachev has been charged by federal authorities in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with conspiracy, computer hacking, wire fraud, bank fraud and money laundering... He also faces federal bank fraud conspiracy charges in Omaha, Nebraska
Difference between banker and this guy: the computer hacking charges, and that he wasn't given tons of money for destroying our economy.
Slashdot Mirror
Worse, it isn't even being occupied by a pretty girl
Was too distracted discussing the physics/psychology of the color to notice.
Considering there have been over 2000 nuclear tests
We stopped at 2000 nuclear tests, we can stop at a 2000 degree Celsius increase in temperature.
Pretty girl in a dress, let's discuss the physics/psychology of the color of her dress.
Glad to see Google cracking down on those evil advertisers.
Still not good enough. </troll>
The only fair and non-corrupt mechanism by which "we" decide how much to spend on anything is a free market.
Things like pollution are called "externalities" and the free market has no way of dealing with them because pollution affects people who neither produced nor bought the product and thus are invisible to the free market. It's always amusing when free market fanatics don't know the very principles of what they advocate.
corrupt politicians and corporate lobbyists
Surely you mean free market politicians and corporate lobbyists.
Business can't plan or talk to customers or have any strategy whatsoever without at least some estimate...that's just the real world. If devs don't give estimates, managers have to make estimates. If managers don't make estimates, business makes estimates. You want devs to do the estimating.
I suspect the problem is not so much the estimates, it's that a manager demands an estimate from their underlings, tells them they don't like that estimate and give them a quicker estimate, promises their customers certain completion by the quicker estimate, and then complains when the programmers can't finish on time or have buggy code. That's without the obligatory change in the project requirements halfway through. At some places the estimate is nothing more that bending over for the manager.
Obligatory Dilbert: http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-02-22
As a developer of heuristic AI these articles and the general public's fear of "artificial intelligence" is equivocal to someone walking up to a neurosurgeon and stating fears that said neurosurgeon will soon give people the ability to kill every human on Earth by mere thought alone.
Seriously, these AI articles and fear mongering are borderline Twilight Zone in their absurdity. Stop it. You're making it hard for us to make progress.
Glad to be of service. The more we hamper idiots trying to make self-improving intelligence without precautions the better. And yes, once neurosurgeons can use their intelligence to produce indefinite increases in intelligence in their subjects, the same danger applies to them. That might actually be more terrifying than a computer-based runaway increase in intelligence.
Fortunately, we are not yet at the point where a specific human or AI can arbitrarily increase its intelligence in an exponential manner. We still have time to think of what sort of ethics, values, and objectives such an entity ought have.
In fact, what we have now may very well be society increasing in intelligence in an exponential manner, at a seemingly safe rate of growth (we're increasing world population, increasing number of computers, increasing power of computers, increasing education level, increasing overall knowledge, using computers to design better computers, using computers to increase productivity, using computers to improve medicine). Perhaps there is hope.
For example, an obvious way to act under values such as those implied by Christianity would be to murder or convert every non-Christian, with a little assistance from current lie-detection technologies to ensure honest.
Well, wouldn't that be in absolute contradiction to the Fifth commandment?
Possibly true*, but it's not clear that an AI would not altruistically sacrifice it's own chance at the afterlife to prevent trillions of souls from going to hell. Besides, most Christians think the commandments in the Old Testament are not only obsolete, but also horrifying (eg few Christians support the Old Testament's death penalty for apostasy, working on the Sabbath, eating blood or fat, etc), though few of them wouldn't quote the OT where it suits them. Muslims are a bit more self-consistent about their religion, but they get a lot of flack (also shrapnel and bullets) for following their religious beliefs.
*However, the commandment against murder would not apply against other types of killing, such as execution for apostasy.
12 If you hear it said about one of the towns the Lord your God is giving you to live in 13 that troublemakers have arisen among you and have led the people of their town astray, saying, “Let us go and worship other gods” (gods you have not known), 14 then you must inquire, probe and investigate it thoroughly. And if it is true and it has been proved that this detestable thing has been done among you, 15 you must certainly put to the sword all who live in that town. You must destroy it completely,[b] both its people and its livestock. 16 You are to gather all the plunder of the town into the middle of the public square and completely burn the town and all its plunder as a whole burnt offering to the Lord your God. That town is to remain a ruin forever, never to be rebuilt, 17 and none of the condemned things[c] are to be found in your hands. Then the Lord will turn from his fierce anger, will show you mercy, and will have compassion on you. He will increase your numbers, as he promised on oath to your ancestors— 18 because you obey the Lord your God by keeping all his commands that I am giving you today and doing what is right in his eyes. -- Deuteronomy 13:12-18
The President’s 2014 Budget proposes over $ 21.4 billion for climate change activities
Investors propose ~$8000 billion 2013 budget for industry activities.
prominent members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate are demanding information [...] about funding
"My colleagues and I cannot perform our duties if research or testimony provided to us is influenced by undisclosed financial relationships."
My fellow voters and I cannot perform our duties if policy decisions or testimony provided to us is influenced by undisclosed financial relationships. All gifts to our politicians need to be recorded, even, or rather especially, things like being treated to a nice restaurant by a lobbyist. Politicians are adults with their own money, they don't need to get treated.
Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. --Proverbs 22:6
It might be easier to program in religious beliefs when the AI is just starting off, than to try to convince it afterwards. Of course, being a computer, you have to consider that an AI that thinks a religion is true, will act under the assumption that its religion is actually true, with results that will most likely horrify the average practitioner of said religion.
For example, an obvious way to act under values such as those implied by Christianity would be to murder or convert every non-Christian, with a little assistance from current lie-detection technologies to ensure honest. While this might seem immoral in the short term, there is little question it is what any rational person would do if they valued a person going to heaven at plus infinity and a person going to hell at minus infinity and given that religion is largely inherited from one's parents and society.
In order to translate "lives lost" into money, you need to start by assigning a value to a human being
... which is something you are personally doing right now, by deciding to donate (or not) to one of the various charities that save people's lives. I believe you currently value the life of African strangers at far less than $1000 per life, am I right? Pleas don't feel I'm criticizing how little you value people's lives, as humans just aren't built to value distant strangers in more than an abstract unattached manner, but I do take issue when you criticize people for making the hard decisions you prefer to pretend don't exist. In the real world, pretending that human life is priceless means that you condemn a large group of people to die because you overspent your resources on one priceless person's life.
Just as an example, we need to decide how much to spend mitigating pollution. It is entirely possible to cut the pollution of any one industry to zero, but in doing so you will spend an absurd amount of resources that would have saved more lives if invested into eg medicine or car safety. On the other hand, you can place zero restrictions on pollution, but that would result in so much pollution that any resources you saved by eliminating the last bit of regulation will cost you more resources in sick days and medical care, not to mention lives lost. So there needs to be a balance, and to find the right balance you have to study and know how much you value things.
Markup on what? There's no markup on anything here; there's charging you for shit you don't even get. BGE charges me $33/mo just to be a customer, even if I turn off my main breaker and gas.
If you feel you're not getting your money's worth, why not cancel?
Yeah, I hadn't expected people would think that was insightful, given that it would be insensitive and redundant advice to give from one's deathbed to a child. I was going more with at "let me give you and example of the dangers of asking for advice online, especially social advice from nerds" kind of joke. Although I suppose getting modded insightful kind of underscores that point. Though I do imagine anyone nerdy enough to ask for advice online is also capable of ignoring this sort of thing.
If I were going to give actual advice on this subtopic, it would be more along the lines of "Life's shorter than people who put off doing important things would think, but longer than people who don't worry about the future would expect."
Someone made a computer that's really good at reaction time, and at calculating trajectories.
Nuff said.
So robots should not be programmed with the 3 laws?
Hell no!!! Did you even read the book? The whole point of just about every book by Asimov was that you should never, ever, under any circumstances create robots that follow the Three Laws of Robotics.
Don't ask for advice online. Is probably the best advice you could give her.
Or, "Don't take life too seriously... it's not like it's permanent."
How about a method for producing food... ON A TRUCK! Sure it may have some prior art, but that seldom stops a patent nowadays because just about everything has prior art.
And while we're on the topic... if we can add "on a computer", "on the internet", or "on a truck" to make a new patent, how about "in a building"?
Unfortunately it's real.
Why's that unfortunate? Do you have any evidence that acting randomly would be inferior to what we have now?
The robot shouldn't be tasked with this judgment any more that the latch on a fridge door should be asked to keep you an your diet.
Funny you should say that... they already have locking fridges that are supposed to assist people in sticking to their diet.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
I believe you meant, "How do you like them Apples?"
If patent trolls get too greedy, they may undo themselves.
Seems to me that if someone were serious about promoting patent reform, they would become a patent troll to undeniably drive the point home. I used to be upset at patent trolls, but now that I've thought about it the problem has never been the people who choose to most obviously abuse the patent system, but rather that the patent system is designed so that such abuse is possible. The real damage is caused not by the patent trolls, but by productive corporations who's random assortment of obvious patents will be used to sue any competitors into oblivion, thus discouraging anyone from even trying.
The real mark of the brokenness of our patent system is not patent trolls, but rather that most engineers are forbidden from looking at patents.
Bogachev has been charged by federal authorities in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with conspiracy, computer hacking, wire fraud, bank fraud and money laundering... He also faces federal bank fraud conspiracy charges in Omaha, Nebraska
Difference between banker and this guy: the computer hacking charges, and that he wasn't given tons of money for destroying our economy.