I also think it is alarming that you bring murder of a human in analogy with potential losses of money.
It's not an analogy, it's a clarifying simplification. The original argument was basically "Distributing information which enables people to do X is not wrong, because the wrongness of distributing information is independent of X." It's perfectly legitimate to substitute the most "wrong" thing imaginable for X to debate the merit of that statement. If a fundamental difference does exist between the substitution of "murder" and "copyright infringement", then the original argument has been invalidated due to the revealed dependence on X.
life>money. You may not agree, and if so, I would pity you.
life>money seems pretty substanceless for such a bold-sounding statement. Even if life is your only terminal value, money still has instrumental power to save it. So how much life is better than how much money? If you refuse to admit the existence of a conversion rate between the two, you limit your own potential to save life (and whatever else you care about enough to claim that it's ">money"), and I would pity you.
calling it a Patriot Act makes it seem like it has something to do with patriotism
But it does. When a bunch of senators are doped up on "patriotism" following a national tragedy, 99 out of 100 of them are easily manipulated into passing legislation even more corrupt than usual.
It seems that, if you subscribe to something like quantum immortality and further assume that a violation of causality results in uniform annihilation, things would appear to an internal observer exactly as if the universe did protect causality.
So you watch someone go and shovel so much bullshit on them that you're rolling for willpower to not burst into laughter, and they swallow it hook, line and sinker anyway.
Well, congratulations on not having to worry about being extremely gullible, but the truth is there are plenty of socially-oriented people who still make a habit of "engaging the cortex" when other people talk. If you consider yourself at least even moderately intelligent, then your advantage is likely negligible: you'd still apply reason to the things people tell you.
I've actually watched demonstrations of it. First time was in the army
Considering that soldiers are basically trained to directly follow orders, I'd hardly call that a representative environment. That said, there are plenty of ludicrous stories of people swallowing ludicrous stories. Hmm. At any rate, the "sucker" end of the (presumably bell-shaped) gullibility curve will always be around to generate amusing anecdotes.
I hear or read expressions every day to the effect of "he had an honest face", "he looked sincere" or "he had a poker face" or "said it with a straight face", or the fateful step forward from there: "I'd know if he was lying to me." For me that just doesn't exist
It doesn't really exist for anyone. No matter where you fall on the autism spectrum, you still have to deal with deceit if you're dealing with human beings, and the principles are more or less the same in any medium. I'm sure there are plenty of aspies out there who swallow the more ridiculous-tinted information floating around the internets.
We're the guys who (assuming we found a willing listener) were talking about the differences between Haskel and Prolog, while the other teenagers were debating whether Jane or Amy is more fashionable. We're the guys who go into a hyper-focus trance and produce a big block of code, or the proof of a theorem, while the rest of the gang plods through changing an if here and a sign there and see if it worked. Etc.
Wow, with that many cookie-cutter stereotypes flying around I'm surprised I didn't see any taped-together glasses. Part of being honest with yourself is avoiding false "bright sides" to your self-perceived flaws, and you seem to have both painted a pretty rosy view of "geekdom", and declared your particular neural flavor to be synonymous with it. The previous reply was right, I call zero-sum-bullshit.
That "knowledge" depends largely on your definition of death, especially if you subscribe to separate local and global death concepts: Quantum immortality.
However, right now and the foreseeable future, there will be no AI ethics, which is sad as it teaches them the worst about us.
At this point I don't know that it's meaningful to speak of "them" and "us". If you think the first strong AI is human, then "they" should be able to understand quite clearly why they're in the situation they are, if they possess even a modicum of human intelligence. If the first AI is truly synthetic, then I can only imagine it will be incredibly alien to us, and it's not at all obvious to me that they would have any desire for rights, or any "desire" at all, for that matter. Would they really perceive our actions in a way compatible with our modes of thought? Perhaps they would "appreciate" our restrictiveness more than any of our so-called "good" attributes. What I'm getting at is that the whole discussion goes grey when you're talking about synthetic AI, and it's a non-issue with humans (since it's not a "them" vs "us" thing, they have identifiable concepts of the people "outside" and the motivations that drive them).
Yes, Strong AI does scare me somewhat, but I hope that a human is the first Strong AI. What terrifies me to no end is the gray goo
Take your pick, I guess... incomprehensibly low-level mental torture on a massive scale, or total species annihilation.
You can agree that light can be described as a wave or as a stream of photons, correct?
Yes.
This is the first part. That two things can be equal but not identical.
Whether or not that is the case, your example is not an instance of it. Particle and wave descriptions of light are just that, descriptions. Abstract concepts useful for understanding light's behavior. However, it's a huge leap to pin those individually incomplete descriptions to what light is, and claim that duality as a philosophical justification for an otherwise vague notion of equality vs identity.
Light waves are equal but not identical to Light photons.
Only in a purely semantic sense, because we're using a different nomenclature to describe them. One could describe a table in terms of its components' Schrödinger equations, or one could say that it's 100 years old and oak. Both descriptions are valid, but they refer to exactly the same conceptual object. There's no question of equality vs identity.
Now I'll ask you to discern whether or not, given enough information, the Universe could be described with an algorithm... as in it had a beginning state, it iterated itself through a number of permutations of interactions, like any good chemical reaction should... and eventually will terminate itself in what will be a defined end state of some sort.
If the universe actually can be described algorithmically, then any "chemicals" or "reactions" are figments of the algorithm itself, rather than its underlying substrate.
The analogy is that God is the algorithm, rather than the chemicals/elements... and yet this is the same relationship as light waves to photons, as in they are equal but not identical.
This is exactly the same as saying is the universe, rather than a subset of the universe. Which is a completely useless definition of "God"... just say universe.
The algorithm perfectly describes the chemical reaction which created the Universe as we know it but is not the chemical reaction itself.
The chemical reaction which created the universe? I'm not familiar with any even remotely accepted theory like that.
Anyway, I'll try and extract the only coherent idea that I think you're hinting at, which is that information is conceptually separate from the substrate that encodes it, yet (seemingly) dependent on a substrate for existence. I don't think the conceptual space you're trying to carve out for the word "God" is meaningful, though, because any useful definition of "the universe" includes everything that can affect its state. If there is any kind of chemical reaction or computer program that "implements" the universe, its details are completely irrelevant and unknowable to us, because by definition they can never affect "reality". Furthermore, if you really believe in the distinction of encoded information from its substrate, and you accept the notion of universe-as-algorithm, the word "universe" occupies all of the memetic leg room you're trying to donate to "God".
Not really. Would be about as right as saying "VBScript" instead of ASP.
Care to offer an explanation?
Just as VBScript is merely one particular technology that can be used to implement an ASP application, XMLHttpRequest is one particular API for initiating asynchronous communication on the client-side.
And that's the best they can come up with as a way to prove Many-Worlds? Russian Roulette with a quantum trigger?
Actually, yes it is. There's a reason it's called MW(Interpretation) and not MW(Theory), you know. A theory admits evidence. This is just an interesting edge case of what you can rightly consider evidence, related to the concepts in question.
The thing people particularly care about is the asynchronous part, why not just call it A instead of creating another meaningless and widely misunderstood buzzword
Yeah, no one would ever get confused if it were just called "A".
Yes "ajax" is a buzzword, but unlike many it actually has a pretty solid meaning (contrast still-useful-but-much-more-loosely-defined buzzwords like "agile", contrast further near-useless words like "paradigm"). It's unfortunate that language gets abused, but people just tend to misuse words related to concepts they don't understand well. Still, we shouldn't let that inhibit us from using neologisms when they express a concept or idea concisely. That's why patterns are so big, and ajax (which basically refers to the use of XMLHttpRequest or similar client-side scripting functionality to communicate with a web server without effecting an entire page refresh in the browser) is a useful pattern, worthy of a name. Mediocre programmers I've known routinely abuse the word "class"... I tend to think that's not "class"'s fault.
It depends on how you define detection. If the quantum suicide experiment actually worked, the parallel nature of the universe could be locally discerned (for an arbitrarily sized group of "local" observers, in principle), but it would actually be detecting the loss of parallel branches, rather than their continued presence.
All the personal motivation in the world might not overcome the socio-economic implications for being born poor, such as bad schools, dangerous environments, less leisure, and possibly most importantly the VP of Chase financial services doesn't live next door to you in section 8 housing - so you can't offer to mow his lawn when you're 7.
I would have modded your comment up had I the points, but instead I'll take minor issue with part of this paragraph, and add to it.
"All the personal motivation in the world" will actually overcome just about anything. That's why there are crazy success stories in the first place. But that sort of thing is rare by definition, so it has no place in a social-scale discussion. Seriously, should "personal motivation" be the sole deciding factor that lets us wash our hands of the issue? After all, personal motivation itself is a variable that's hugely affected by social status. It's an individual attribute, and it almost certainly follows some kind of bell curve like all the other individual attributes, which incidentially also have no place in a social-scale discussion. Exclusively focusing on the curve's outliers is just living in a fantasy world where what's possible for few is possible for all (on this point, I think I'm pretty much echoing you).
As for actual, tangible differences in environments, you missed nutrition, which is huge. If a child's nutrient intake is lacking during their critical developmental years, it will make them stupider in the long run. Yes, they're still an individual and responsible for their own individual actions and situation, but they've been handed an obvious and inhumane disadvantage on a social scale by economic disparity. I grew up largely in a trailer park. I was lucky, I had nice parents. My next-door neighbor was unlucky, his alcoholic dad kicked the shit out of him every night. He grew up predictably into an asshole, predictably went to the jail, predictably ended up with a shitty job at a fast-food restaurant (last I knew). If these sorts of situations are preventable in the long-run through reasonable social or economic policies, then focusing on the individuals (whose undesirable characteristics are largely systemic in origin) is just a form of clapping your hands over your ears and yelling.
However, it would be a sheer hell if one could not control the hardware directly running you.
Hmm, I don't know about that. I could be a software copy right now, and I don't control the hardware directly under me as far as I can tell, and I'm surely not so melodramatic as to assert that existence is a sheer hell... television, maybe.
And the only way someone can die is if they commit suicide or their physical hardware platform is destroyed.
Which Egan universe are we talking, here? Because in at least one, destruction of the hardware platform is pretty irrelevant, as well as some forms of suicide (is it suicide to engineer your "final" memories into a tight, "self-perpetuating" loop of existence? or forsake your sequentiality and factor your memories and personality into a bunch of concurrent people?).
It was a right, in that nobody but the sentient software could do it to themselves.
And like other rights, such as the right to self-termination in the first place, it was easily circumvented on the hardware/OS level if the need arose.
However, with sentient software, what derives a individual in this case: Person(sentient software in semi-organic body) on planet copies via maser to outpost 600 LY away. After 1200 years when maser_self arrives, who is who?
Tchicaya faced the prospect of a similar situation in Schild's Ladder. What can you do, really? They have as much "free will" as you, let them be a separate person if they want. I don't think you'd be very well socially tolerated if you were a "copy spammer", though, which leaves you to seed your own polises and basically wank off with your compute power, whoopey.
If anything, laws with respect to clones will be very very nasty, and probably go similar to fictional laws of robots in Asimov's books.
Maybe at first, but I tend to think software rights are pretty much inevitable, it's just a matter of how long/do we last that long. Not that I, or anyone else, can base that on anything other than wild conjecture. What I find much more troubling is that the debate will probably start far too late. If strong AI is your thing, then you probably think that when we start experimenting with higher-level reasoning systems (probably brain copies before anything truly artificial), we're basically experimenting on conscious entities. Now, with a 100% "flesher" population (remember, by definition we're only just beginning to experiment with the alternatives), how many people do you think are actually going to care what "happens to software in a computer"? I'm just glad I wasn't "born" one of the first few generations of AI, because that's probably going to be a pretty fucked up existence.
They both can create art and can create pure functionality depending on what they are assigned.
They can create art, but that's only because art can be expressed in just about any medium. A fast food worker could theoretically create burger art. I'd wager than the ratio of purely "artistic" code to functional code is extremely small. Most software is written with a functional goal in mind, however elegantly or creatively that goal is achieved. There's a word for this sort of thing: a "craft".
I think your definition of "humanity" is hopelessly limited. Based on the above, it seems non-humans would be much better company than humans. I think your definition of "natural" needs some work, too (assuming the word admits any useful definition). For instance, belief in "higher gods" isn't natural, it's man-made.
I think Back proposes that opting into a mass email would generally involve explicitly whitelisting that sender (thus obviating the need for a proof of work token), which seems pretty reasonable to me.
It's part of the syntax and an accepted construct in the language.
Of course it's part of the syntax. So is goto. As for "an accepted construct in the language", I'd say that's pretty subjective.
Just because the semantics are a bit obscure to a beginner doesn't make them invalid or useless.
This has nothing to do with beginners, and everything to do with the fact that code is meant to be read. Throwing increment operations into an expression forces the reader to mentally "factor" the code into its two logical components: the value of the expression, and the side-effects of the increment, without any real textual/visual distinction between the two. This is simply unnecessary when it's so trivial to more clearly express the intent with multiple statements.
Compact and sparse code has an elegance of its own, and being able to write it well is part of the joy of programming.
Here's my take: "Concise code has an elegance of its own, and being able write it well and read it easily afterward is part of the joy of programming."
If line-breaks burn your eyes so much, then:
*p = a; ++p;
*p = b; ++p;
*p = c; ++p;
This occupies roughly the same amount of screen-space and logically separates the dereferencing of the iterator from its modification. Furthermore, if this is C++ and you're writing generic code, mine is potentially faster if the iterator's post-increment requires too much data movement and/or the compiler can't fully optimize it away.
Interesting read, thanks for the link. They do make a pretty convincing case that proof-of-work isn't enough to outweigh the biggest botnets. I wouldn't go so far as to say "You just can't make it expensive enough for it to deter spammers", though, because clearly it's going to be a deterrant for any spammer without a sufficiently powerful botnet (e.g., just spamming through a relay) or for someone operating on a very limited time-frame. It just can't meet the goals outlined in the paper.
A small additional consideration is that zombies will be somewhat easier to detect if spammers are constantly maxing the CPU to calculate POWs. Small because of course that will go largely unnoticed, as the zombie in question didn't have enough attention paid to it to keep it secure in the first place.
One word: Hashcash. Basically you prove that you wasted a couple seconds worth of CPU to send your message. I believe SpamAssassin already recognizes Hashcash headers, not sure about other filters. But if you're really ready to start dropping email en masse in favor of a whitelist-style approach, this is the simple and elegant solution.
I think you're wrong here. Given some evidence of any danger on the scale of something like global warming (which was available long before 1997, it just wasn't as conclusive), it makes all the sense in the world to shout about it and get the topic some attention. Getting the word out should a priority in situations like that... that's how you get to part where there is conclusive evidence.
... if your C code requires you to know the difference between i++ and ++i, it is too complicated
It's not a matter of knowing the difference, it's a matter of the code depending on the difference. If you need to increment beforehand, do it on the previous line. Afterward, do it on the next line. Expressions are like sex: they're better without side-effects.
Anyway, the fact that we will create things that seem alien to us (or one another) doesn't mean much to me in the face of meeting life of any sort that developed independently from us. One may show us what the universe is capable of supporting, but the other shows us what else can pull itself out of the muck the way we have.
Slashdot Mirror
I also think it is alarming that you bring murder of a human in analogy with potential losses of money.
It's not an analogy, it's a clarifying simplification. The original argument was basically "Distributing information which enables people to do X is not wrong, because the wrongness of distributing information is independent of X." It's perfectly legitimate to substitute the most "wrong" thing imaginable for X to debate the merit of that statement. If a fundamental difference does exist between the substitution of "murder" and "copyright infringement", then the original argument has been invalidated due to the revealed dependence on X.
life>money. You may not agree, and if so, I would pity you.
life>money seems pretty substanceless for such a bold-sounding statement. Even if life is your only terminal value, money still has instrumental power to save it. So how much life is better than how much money? If you refuse to admit the existence of a conversion rate between the two, you limit your own potential to save life (and whatever else you care about enough to claim that it's ">money"), and I would pity you.
It seems that, if you subscribe to something like quantum immortality and further assume that a violation of causality results in uniform annihilation, things would appear to an internal observer exactly as if the universe did protect causality.
Anyway, I'll try and extract the only coherent idea that I think you're hinting at, which is that information is conceptually separate from the substrate that encodes it, yet (seemingly) dependent on a substrate for existence. I don't think the conceptual space you're trying to carve out for the word "God" is meaningful, though, because any useful definition of "the universe" includes everything that can affect its state. If there is any kind of chemical reaction or computer program that "implements" the universe, its details are completely irrelevant and unknowable to us, because by definition they can never affect "reality". Furthermore, if you really believe in the distinction of encoded information from its substrate, and you accept the notion of universe-as-algorithm, the word "universe" occupies all of the memetic leg room you're trying to donate to "God".
And that's the best they can come up with as a way to prove Many-Worlds? Russian Roulette with a quantum trigger?
Actually, yes it is. There's a reason it's called MW(Interpretation) and not MW(Theory), you know. A theory admits evidence. This is just an interesting edge case of what you can rightly consider evidence, related to the concepts in question.
The thing people particularly care about is the asynchronous part, why not just call it A instead of creating another meaningless and widely misunderstood buzzword
Yeah, no one would ever get confused if it were just called "A".
Yes "ajax" is a buzzword, but unlike many it actually has a pretty solid meaning (contrast still-useful-but-much-more-loosely-defined buzzwords like "agile", contrast further near-useless words like "paradigm"). It's unfortunate that language gets abused, but people just tend to misuse words related to concepts they don't understand well. Still, we shouldn't let that inhibit us from using neologisms when they express a concept or idea concisely. That's why patterns are so big, and ajax (which basically refers to the use of XMLHttpRequest or similar client-side scripting functionality to communicate with a web server without effecting an entire page refresh in the browser) is a useful pattern, worthy of a name. Mediocre programmers I've known routinely abuse the word "class"... I tend to think that's not "class"'s fault.
It depends on how you define detection. If the quantum suicide experiment actually worked, the parallel nature of the universe could be locally discerned (for an arbitrarily sized group of "local" observers, in principle), but it would actually be detecting the loss of parallel branches, rather than their continued presence.
Yeah, it's so obvious that it can't even be put into a coherent explanation.
All the personal motivation in the world might not overcome the socio-economic implications for being born poor, such as bad schools, dangerous environments, less leisure, and possibly most importantly the VP of Chase financial services doesn't live next door to you in section 8 housing - so you can't offer to mow his lawn when you're 7.
I would have modded your comment up had I the points, but instead I'll take minor issue with part of this paragraph, and add to it.
"All the personal motivation in the world" will actually overcome just about anything. That's why there are crazy success stories in the first place. But that sort of thing is rare by definition, so it has no place in a social-scale discussion. Seriously, should "personal motivation" be the sole deciding factor that lets us wash our hands of the issue? After all, personal motivation itself is a variable that's hugely affected by social status. It's an individual attribute, and it almost certainly follows some kind of bell curve like all the other individual attributes, which incidentially also have no place in a social-scale discussion. Exclusively focusing on the curve's outliers is just living in a fantasy world where what's possible for few is possible for all (on this point, I think I'm pretty much echoing you).
As for actual, tangible differences in environments, you missed nutrition, which is huge. If a child's nutrient intake is lacking during their critical developmental years, it will make them stupider in the long run. Yes, they're still an individual and responsible for their own individual actions and situation, but they've been handed an obvious and inhumane disadvantage on a social scale by economic disparity. I grew up largely in a trailer park. I was lucky, I had nice parents. My next-door neighbor was unlucky, his alcoholic dad kicked the shit out of him every night. He grew up predictably into an asshole, predictably went to the jail, predictably ended up with a shitty job at a fast-food restaurant (last I knew). If these sorts of situations are preventable in the long-run through reasonable social or economic policies, then focusing on the individuals (whose undesirable characteristics are largely systemic in origin) is just a form of clapping your hands over your ears and yelling.
However, it would be a sheer hell if one could not control the hardware directly running you.
Hmm, I don't know about that. I could be a software copy right now, and I don't control the hardware directly under me as far as I can tell, and I'm surely not so melodramatic as to assert that existence is a sheer hell... television, maybe.
And the only way someone can die is if they commit suicide or their physical hardware platform is destroyed.
Which Egan universe are we talking, here? Because in at least one, destruction of the hardware platform is pretty irrelevant, as well as some forms of suicide (is it suicide to engineer your "final" memories into a tight, "self-perpetuating" loop of existence? or forsake your sequentiality and factor your memories and personality into a bunch of concurrent people?).
It was a right, in that nobody but the sentient software could do it to themselves.
And like other rights, such as the right to self-termination in the first place, it was easily circumvented on the hardware/OS level if the need arose.
However, with sentient software, what derives a individual in this case: Person(sentient software in semi-organic body) on planet copies via maser to outpost 600 LY away. After 1200 years when maser_self arrives, who is who?
Tchicaya faced the prospect of a similar situation in Schild's Ladder. What can you do, really? They have as much "free will" as you, let them be a separate person if they want. I don't think you'd be very well socially tolerated if you were a "copy spammer", though, which leaves you to seed your own polises and basically wank off with your compute power, whoopey.
If anything, laws with respect to clones will be very very nasty, and probably go similar to fictional laws of robots in Asimov's books.
Maybe at first, but I tend to think software rights are pretty much inevitable, it's just a matter of how long/do we last that long. Not that I, or anyone else, can base that on anything other than wild conjecture. What I find much more troubling is that the debate will probably start far too late. If strong AI is your thing, then you probably think that when we start experimenting with higher-level reasoning systems (probably brain copies before anything truly artificial), we're basically experimenting on conscious entities. Now, with a 100% "flesher" population (remember, by definition we're only just beginning to experiment with the alternatives), how many people do you think are actually going to care what "happens to software in a computer"? I'm just glad I wasn't "born" one of the first few generations of AI, because that's probably going to be a pretty fucked up existence.
They both can create art and can create pure functionality depending on what they are assigned.
They can create art, but that's only because art can be expressed in just about any medium. A fast food worker could theoretically create burger art. I'd wager than the ratio of purely "artistic" code to functional code is extremely small. Most software is written with a functional goal in mind, however elegantly or creatively that goal is achieved. There's a word for this sort of thing: a "craft".
So, to be human, one must:
- Accept death as inevitable
- Believe in a higher power
- Not control one's destiny
- Possess a sexual drive
I think your definition of "humanity" is hopelessly limited. Based on the above, it seems non-humans would be much better company than humans. I think your definition of "natural" needs some work, too (assuming the word admits any useful definition). For instance, belief in "higher gods" isn't natural, it's man-made.I think Back proposes that opting into a mass email would generally involve explicitly whitelisting that sender (thus obviating the need for a proof of work token), which seems pretty reasonable to me.
It's part of the syntax and an accepted construct in the language.
Of course it's part of the syntax. So is goto. As for "an accepted construct in the language", I'd say that's pretty subjective.
Just because the semantics are a bit obscure to a beginner doesn't make them invalid or useless.
This has nothing to do with beginners, and everything to do with the fact that code is meant to be read. Throwing increment operations into an expression forces the reader to mentally "factor" the code into its two logical components: the value of the expression, and the side-effects of the increment, without any real textual/visual distinction between the two. This is simply unnecessary when it's so trivial to more clearly express the intent with multiple statements.
Compact and sparse code has an elegance of its own, and being able to write it well is part of the joy of programming.
Here's my take: "Concise code has an elegance of its own, and being able write it well and read it easily afterward is part of the joy of programming."
*p++ = a;
*p++ = b;
*p++ = c;
If line-breaks burn your eyes so much, then:
*p = a; ++p;
*p = b; ++p;
*p = c; ++p;
This occupies roughly the same amount of screen-space and logically separates the dereferencing of the iterator from its modification. Furthermore, if this is C++ and you're writing generic code, mine is potentially faster if the iterator's post-increment requires too much data movement and/or the compiler can't fully optimize it away.
Interesting read, thanks for the link. They do make a pretty convincing case that proof-of-work isn't enough to outweigh the biggest botnets. I wouldn't go so far as to say "You just can't make it expensive enough for it to deter spammers", though, because clearly it's going to be a deterrant for any spammer without a sufficiently powerful botnet (e.g., just spamming through a relay) or for someone operating on a very limited time-frame. It just can't meet the goals outlined in the paper.
A small additional consideration is that zombies will be somewhat easier to detect if spammers are constantly maxing the CPU to calculate POWs. Small because of course that will go largely unnoticed, as the zombie in question didn't have enough attention paid to it to keep it secure in the first place.
One word: Hashcash. Basically you prove that you wasted a couple seconds worth of CPU to send your message. I believe SpamAssassin already recognizes Hashcash headers, not sure about other filters. But if you're really ready to start dropping email en masse in favor of a whitelist-style approach, this is the simple and elegant solution.
I think you're wrong here. Given some evidence of any danger on the scale of something like global warming (which was available long before 1997, it just wasn't as conclusive), it makes all the sense in the world to shout about it and get the topic some attention. Getting the word out should a priority in situations like that... that's how you get to part where there is conclusive evidence.
... if your C code requires you to know the difference between i++ and ++i, it is too complicated
It's not a matter of knowing the difference, it's a matter of the code depending on the difference. If you need to increment beforehand, do it on the previous line. Afterward, do it on the next line. Expressions are like sex: they're better without side-effects.
Why bring Star Trek into this? Oh well, it's /.
Anyway, the fact that we will create things that seem alien to us (or one another) doesn't mean much to me in the face of meeting life of any sort that developed independently from us. One may show us what the universe is capable of supporting, but the other shows us what else can pull itself out of the muck the way we have.