there is ZERO advantage to an internet enabled toaster. Z E R O.
No? What if it prints darth vader on the toast for your kids, but they want han solo? What if the fuzzy logic that makes sure the toast is properly browned doesn't work on darker bread, but they figure it out and can upgrade it and the wife LOVES darker breads? What if it prints JAR JAR on the toast but you could upgrade it to print Leia??? JAR JAR man, you HAVE to get rid of that, it'll crush your kid's very SOULS.
No. They don't. That's my exact point. My OSX, version 10.7, has broken UDP broadcast reception -- it can only serve one client at a time (for BROADCAST packets!) My OSX can't print UTF-8 text through the console correctly. I even know what the problem is, and Apple knows what it is too, I spoke to the guy who wrote the CUPs stuff himself while we worked out what it was, and when we did, he informed me that a compiler bug prevents the feature from working on a Mac Mini (works fine on my Mac Pro.) He also informed me it wasn't going to be fixed. I had to fix THAT problem by buying a new mac mini that used a later processor, and that in turn forced an OS upgrade, and that turn screwed me other ways. And all I bloody wanted was for printing to work! (This was for a point of sale application for the Mini where I had to print Chinese from a Python application as well as English. No UTF-8 == no Chinese.) My Safari leaks memory like a sieve with a hole in it -- a few hours use results in over 4 GIGABYTES of memory use that comes back the instant I quit Safari, every time. My OSX has a bug deep in the color balance/render routines that causes somewhat regular hangs of very busy graphics programs. And so on.
Wanting these things fixed is not about wanting "new feature X", it's about wanting feature C, which was supposed to be there in the first place.
Now, one or more of these may (may!) be fixed in 10.7 or later. But 10.6 is the last version of OSX that supports PPC applications, of which I have a large number, and for which I paid a great deal of money all in all, AND which are still very useful to me. So you see, the idea of leaving 10.6 around, broken, not performing as advertised, is not an issue of wanting "future" features. I just want it to work as it was supposed to.
No. You can pretty much count on the fact that almost nothing I propose depends on legislation. That well has been completely poisoned.
In this instance, I'd like to see consumers realize they are being repeatedly screwed w/o lube, and hold the OS and app vendor's feet to the fire in the traditional way: by voting with their wallet.
I know the odds perfectly well. That's how I feel anyway.
My thermostat is just a device on my wall which regulates my furnace - it has no business being internet-enabled.
What if that could save you money? (it can.) What if it adds convenience and security? (it can.) What if it informs you about your usage such that you can improve your comfort level? (it can.) What if it gives you remote information, such as "the heater has failed, the pipes will freeze, you need to come deal with this" (it can.) What then? Still no business being Internet enabled?
It's not a failure of needlessly Internetting the device; it's a failure of vision on your part (and perhaps a failure on the manufacturer's part to make a secure device... that can be fixed, and pressure should be applied so the fix happens.) Sure, you can get along with your old thermostat. You could get along with a coal stove instead of a gas or electric range, too. But most of the time, not such a good idea.
Facilities that worry about security start with air-gapping their networks so that one simply cannot get into the system from the outside. There is a very, very good reason to keep things inaccessible. Really, there is...
The problem isn't accessibility. That's just a stopgap, though certainly a highly effective one. The real problem is security. Worthy of raving about, for sure. But with the idea of making it actually secure -- not of dumping capability out the window because of too little effort expended.
One thing that's causing problems is the habit of Apple and Microsoft to abandon operating systems for new, often incompatible ones, instead of fixing the bugs in them. OSX 10.6.8 is full of problems; the only way to fix them is to move up to OSX 10.7 or further, which in turn can break a lot of things, because the later release isn't just fixed (if, in fact, it is fixed), it's a different animal altogether. Just one example. OS vendors take the view that you can either move forward with them, or die in a fire. Windows, Ubuntu, XP, etc... same deal.
I'm not saying these old OS's should get new features. But bugs? They should be fixed as long as humanly possible. The product was sold as having feature set X, and working. If it doesn't work as advertised, or is unreliable, it shouldn't be abandoned, it should be fixed. Except in the very rare case where it is not possible (I can't even think of one of those, actually.)
The problem is multifaceted. It isn't just that users are left with a choice of being left behind and becoming steadily more vulnerable to exploits; it is also that as the OS vendors keep jumping away from their buggy versions, the OS landscape, as it were, is left lettered with broken junk, and the new stuff is going to also be broken in new ways (plus, often, the old ways too), because:
None of these OS vendors ever intends to work any product into shape such that it becomes stable, reliable, and actually what it was advertised to be when it was sold. Instead, hey, look over here, New! Shiny!
Then we have application vendors that, for no particular good reason, make their apps not just use, but depend upon new OS features. Generally speaking, you don't have to do that. You can tie a feature to an OS, and there are very good reasons to do so (the feature may not even be possible under a previous one), but then there are things that have no sane reason to be tied to an OS, such as the ability to load a new image format (Apple, I'm thinking of Aperture here.) New interface to load images through? Sure, great idea. Abandoning the old interface? Not generally a sensible thing to do. No doubt there are applications out there that use the old interface, and there will be users with (shock!) new cameras.
I find the entire cycle of abandonment to be reprehensible and ethically bankrupt. I think applications should be maintained until they aren't broken under the OS's they were designed to run under, and OS's should be maintained until they work in every way they were supposed to in the first place, and are kept as secure as possible without actually breaking things. But that's just me.
It's not that much of an illusion. Qt's done some useful work there. I've written one app, quite complex, that runs under both Windows and OSX. The only serious work I had to do was related to USB support, which Qt really hasn't addressed worth a darn. Everything else, though, is just a recompile specifying the target. Sound, networking, file system, GUI and lower level graphics, etc. The apps are a little less efficient, working as they must through a compatibility layer, but they're efficient enough to do the job at hand on even moderately recent hardware, so I'm pretty happy with the whole approach.
No. They aren't. Because they're an arm of the federal government, and all search and seizure by the federal government is formally and unequivocally limited to very specific procedures, which the NSA are not following, by the 4th amendment to the US constitution.
What they are doing is fundamentally illegal, as defined by the very highest law in the land, the very one that authorizes our government to even exist.
Was it your impression that we all live in a banana republic where the government can do anything it wants? Anything congress wants, it gets? That's not how it's supposed to work. When it does work that way, it is broken.
...someone would come up with a calendar standard that measures fractions of a second from approximately the big bang, and on into the heat death of the universe. It's not like bits are expensive, or an add with carry is only an instruction found with some CPUs.
Be nice to have something we don't have to replace over and over again, and which could be used in all manner of scientific and historical endeavors.
The day I got ahold of a couple 74181s was the day I started to build my own machine. No cpus available then. Then the 6800 came home, then the (wonderful!) 6809, then the 68000... won a 68k eval board at a tech show... then the Amiga, SO far ahead of its time... 68020, 68040... then Motorola dropped the ball, Intel took the field.... Windows... sigh.
Eventually, OSX (which I love) and Apple (whom I despise.) linux refused to build a standard UI, locked itself out of the same market Windows and OSX were aiming to own (and which they succeeded in owning), so I never used linux for much more than a (very good) server platform. Always thought that was a wrong turn for everyone. linux being so rabidly anti-commercial, that is. The GPL was the ultimate poison pill for success, "eat me" written in pretty colors all over it. And you did. Oh well.
So I made my way in the world with Windows as much as I had to, the Amiga and later OSX as much as I could get away with, and I have to say, it was a great ride. Much of my financial success, such as it was, came from Windows, true enough, but most of my fun was had elsewhere. My fondest memories are from projects built in assembler, C, Python. Although I did a lot of hardware design career-wise, software was so much more fun. Eventually, I just quit doing hardware. Meh.
I see everything closing down now. Malware and black hats turned a wonderful computer revolution into a PITA for everyone, and the manufacturers followed suit by locking down a great deal that used to be open to play with. We got the abortion of an operating system that is IOS, and the pay-to-develop garden that "supports" it. Kind of like how a punji stick supports a person who stepped in the wrong pit.
Pretty much retired now, sorry to see you guys get hit with such a lousy legacy. In our defense, I think most of us didn't think it would go this way.
But perhaps the next tech revolution will be as much fun, or more so, than the beginning of this one was. I was reading about open source robots today. Someone makes the hardware, you plug in your own apps. You people have a chance to make that your own. Don't blow it like you did linux. Open should mean open. Not just "open if you do it my way."
In summary, get off my lawn -- and go do something wonderful.
The problem isn't that perl is old. The problem is that perl reads (and writes) like encrypted sanskrit and is just generally weird in its approach to everything.
Once you've invested a great deal of time learning it, and its APIs, it's a big deal to change, because you're effective in it... but, speaking from personal experience, after years of perl-ing, I tried something else, and what a revelation it was. Not everyone is willing to put in the kind of effort it takes, and familiarity itself can make nice seem wrongish after years of coding otherwise.
For new entries to the scripting language world, the only really good reason to learn perl is to maintain legacy code. Updates can't fix it -- the very language is a mess. And the fact is, there are some really terrific scripting languages out there now. There's little -- or no -- need to subject one's self to perl.
Spacecraft trajectory calculations are of such a massively different *type* of calculation
We don't know that. We *do* know that generally speaking, unless we're interested in the behavior at the molecular level, systems can be modeled at higher levels than their molecular makeup. That's the point. It remains valid in regards to the brain.
If a *massively* important component (myelin), cannot be properly modeled, how can we expect our simulated neuron to actually work the way a real one does?
You have no basis for the assumption that it cannot be properly modeled, nor even a basis for how much of it needs to be modeled, if any, in order to achieve AI.
We *know* that neurons are affected by the biological environment in which they reside, filled with fluids, hormones, cells, and all sorts of other factors that directly and *significantly* affect their behavior. It may very well be that in order to simulate these interactions with the cell membrane of the neuron
...and it may be that these are the weak points of brain function and do not need to be modeled at all.:) See the problem? You cannot assume you know what needs to be done until it has, in fact, been done and the consequences have been accurately assessed.
However, we don't know what mental self-consciousness even *is*. We've got speculations, ranging from divinity/soul/matrix through to zombie-like ideas about it all just being by-product of biological survival functions
Everything that we do know what is on this earth, though, fall squarely into the physics we've developed up to now. Not divinity; not soul; not zombies; not fields or waves of an unknown kind. The implication is *extremely* strong that this will continue with everything we study, and we have every reason to presume this about cells created under the guidance of DNA. We know a *lot* about such cells all across the animal kingdom, and they're neither magical in operation nor is there any evidence at all that they are drawing upon presently unknown forces. The rational conclusion is that brain cells of every type are the same; that temporal, chemical, electrical, and topological effects account for 100% of everything they do; and that the emergent macro effects that we call intelligence and consciousness are of precisely the same order that make a collection of machine instructions into a spreadsheet, a video game, or a disk driver. Nature is chock full of things that produce macro effects that are expressions of the sum of their makeup, rather than just the makeup itself. It's both rational and reasonable to proceed as if the brain to be such a system -- because we know of no other kind of system whatsoever. If we discover otherwise, that will be profoundly revelatory -- but there's no sign of this at this time. None.
Because of this incredibly strong grounding that at present suffers no exceptions, this appears by *every* sane metric to be the place to look. In order for an idea that this is outside of our presently known physics to be taken seriously, you first have to demonstrate that there IS something outside of our presently known physics. Otherwise it's just hand-waving. Once you do make such a demonstration, then you have to show how it's relevant to the issues at hand.
one does need to consider the possible implications of the supernatural
No. This is utter bunkum. All ideas are not equal. No supernatural *anything* has been demonstrated to exist. Ever. Period. Ideas without any supporting scientific data should not be considered on anything even remotely like an equal basis with real science; an idea backed by experiential, consensual, repeatable experiment and consistent supporting theory is of almost inestimably more value than an idea that is not. When you begin hand-waving about the "supernatural", you might as well be babbling in tongues; it is literally worthy of zero consideration. If you think that some unknown force is at work, then it's 100% on you to present proof that such a force exists, or to point us to someone else who has done so, before you can expect such ideas to be treated with any more respect than any other kind of story someone made up without anything to back it up (not to mention being in direct conflict with everything we do actually understand.)
Over unity stable fusion is bound to be pretty big, at least initially; the only working examples we have of it are huge. We recently beat break even, and there are ideas out there being implemented that could result in functional over-unity systems, one of which is ITER. And of course, there's always the Farnsworth fusor, and fusion weapons, which are pretty small themselves, all things considered.
The brain isn't all that large; but its complexity and the relative functional difference in size between neurons and glia and so forth as compared to silicon computing and analog elements do indeed make it look like a very large project, even when you discount all the volume taken by the non-intelligent things the brain does (regulates heartbeat, breathing, etc.)
I rather expect AI to be tougher than fusion, frankly. But I still expect it to fall to our insatiable curiosity and innovative capabilities.
You have confused this with the correct statement: "Physics cannot yet explain intelligence, consciousness." Life, though, at least of the common carbon-based earthly kind, is pretty much a solved question.
You have fallen for a belief called "physicalism" and claim it to be truth when there is no evidence for that.
Everything -- and I do mean *everything* -- we know of is based upon the objective reality that physics and the associated math describe in a quite detailed manner. Those understandings have given us everything from spaceflight to deep observations in space to electronics and every other real understanding of the world. Furthermore, everything we know of that nature has produced has turned out to operate and be constructed under the same physics. There's not a sign of anything else; there's not even a HINT of such a sign.
No other domain -- not philosophy, not religion, not "magic", not anything -- has produced any workable technology or understanding of actual objective reality of any kind. So it seems pretty clear those aren't the places we should be looking for solutions to questions about the brain, which is, after all, a collection of animal cells which are started as growths under the direction of the same genome that built your fingernails -- which also is not magic.
So that whole, "actually, I am wrong"... nope. You have not demonstrated that at all.:)
Was Einstein redundant and of no benefit? Is Hawking? And why? Intelligence.
That's the idea behind AI. More intelligence applied to particular problems will help, just as history clearly shows. So the goal is to make more.
Less fragile intelligence isn't a bad idea either.
Saying "Ai is inevitable" only makes a few assumptions, those being no particular time frame is implied for the achievement, and that there's no such thing as magic.
The observer effect may not be what we thought it was. Likewise, quantum entanglement produces results that appear to be faster than light based on our mundane understanding of distance. As everything we know -- so far -- tells us that can't happen, it may be that we are not observing the same distances, or perhaps even the same systems. But we can *certainly* fully model rates and synchrony (or lack thereof) of information transmission, so even this weirdness this is likely to be a complete non-issue.
Molecular simulation: There is no evidence this is required. One example: You can model a spacecraft trajectory quite simply, and very accurately; you don't need to model the molecules in the spacecraft and the fuel and the energy states of all of them to do it. Another: You can model balance quite simply, and very accurately; you don't need anything but a little math. Another: You can model a pitched baseball, and you don't need a human or an arm to do it. Another: You can closely model electron flow in many circuits without being too worried about the low level details of the materials themselves. And so on.
Emulations and simulations do not generally suffer the requirement to recreate the modeled system at the atomic level, or anywhere near it; instead, emulations and simulations go after the highest level model that will get the job done, and typically, those are *far* above the atomic level. There's no reason at this time to assume that modeling an intelligence would require such a low level approach -- and many reasons to think it won't. One simple relevant example is that a single neuron can already be accurately modeled at a much higher level than molecularly. It may be that the behavior of groups of neurons can as well; we don't know yet. But we *do* know that molecular level emulation isn't going to be called for.
Just remember: you can be almost any combination of blind, deaf, dumb, touchless, tasteless, limbless, and insensible to pain, and still be intelligent.
We know that the human brain computes with the components it is made of. We know those components are mundane in the sense that they're just chemical, electrical, and topological in operation, with a vague, but entirely unproven possibly that there may be quantum effects that are active. (of course quantum effects exist beneath the more macro processes as fundamental building blocks of materials, but presently there's no evidence they're modifying anything going on at a higher level.)
With this information, we can ask: IF we know what structures to build, can be build or fully emulate them? The answer is yes. Now another question arises, that of adequate speed; the answer to that is unknown at this time, but this is a matter of practicality, not actual achievement of the goal. An intelligent answer in 100 years is still an equally intelligent answer to one that comes in seconds; It's just not as useful, or at all.
Your statement that we know "zero" understanding of what creates intelligence is wrong. We have a body of knowledge that both eliminates quite a few ideas, such as the superstitious ones, and we know a lot about local mechanics of some types of brain cells. We have identified specialized regions that clearly do a lot of the work, or mediate the work, in particular areas such as the visual cortex. We know that the brain usually specializes by hemisphere, mostly from unfortunates who have severed or otherwise damaged corpus callosum. We also have some decent ideas of how to educate an intelligence, simply derived from our own. And we know from physics what things in general are made of, and how they behave, at the level of actively affecting one another. We understand electric signals, a great deal about chemical signals, a good bit about chemical receptors, we get that the topology of connectivity is a thing and an important one, and we know that all of that is doable in emulation once we actually know what it is we need to do.
We need to learn a lot more, absolutely, but we are hardly at "zero."
Further: AI may, or may not, arise as a consequence of trying to recreate the human brain. There may be other paths, perhaps many of them. Depends on what intelligence is, which, as you point out, we don't know. For any case that isn't derived from copying the brain, questions about how our brains work become a lot less relevant to the problem, perhaps not at all. Just the way an FPU works is not particularly relevant to how we do math.
Is machine sentience not only possible, but inevitable?
Of course it is. Why? Physics. What do I mean by that? Everything -- bar none -- works according to the principles of physics. Nothing, so far, has *ever* been discovered that does not do so. While there is more to be determined about physics, there is no sign of irreproducible magic, which is what luddites must invoke to declare AI "impossible" or even "unlikely." When physics allows us to do something, and we understand what it is we want to do, we have an excellent history of going ahead and doing if there is benefit to be had. And in this case, the benefit is almost incalculable -- almost certainly more than electronics has provided thus far. Socially, technically, productively. The brain is an organic machine, no more, no less. We know this because we have looked very hard at it and found absolutely no "secret sauce" of the form of anything inexplicable.
AI is a tough problem, and no doubt it'll be tough to find the first solution to it; but we do have hints, as in, how other brains are constructed, and so we're not running completely blind here. Also, a lot of people are working on, and interested in, solutions.
The claim that AI will never come is squarely in the class of "flying is impossible", "we'll never break the sound barrier", "there's no way we could have landed on the moon", "the genome is too complex to map", and "no one needs more than 640k." It's just shortsighted (and probably fearful) foolishness, born of superstitious and conceited, hubristic foolishness.
Just like all those things, those who actually understand science will calmly watch as progress puts this episode of "it's impossible!" to bed. It's a long running show, though, and I'm sure we'll continue to be roundly entertained by these naysayers.
Yet still following Frederick Pohl's "Age of the Pussyfoot", ca. 1969, wherein a fireman, badly burned, is suspended as no tech is yet available to remediate his injuries.
In this book, Pohl not only covers suspension for later remediation, but also basically describes the modern cellphone, although ours don't have quite as many features as his does. Yet.:) Also some other very cool tech and social ideas.
There are quite a few great ideas that you might think came out of the 80's and 90's SF writers minds, but were roundly preceded by the first round of masters, of which Pohl was certainly one.
Slashdot Mirror
No? What if it prints darth vader on the toast for your kids, but they want han solo? What if the fuzzy logic that makes sure the toast is properly browned doesn't work on darker bread, but they figure it out and can upgrade it and the wife LOVES darker breads? What if it prints JAR JAR on the toast but you could upgrade it to print Leia??? JAR JAR man, you HAVE to get rid of that, it'll crush your kid's very SOULS.
No. They don't. That's my exact point. My OSX, version 10.7, has broken UDP broadcast reception -- it can only serve one client at a time (for BROADCAST packets!) My OSX can't print UTF-8 text through the console correctly. I even know what the problem is, and Apple knows what it is too, I spoke to the guy who wrote the CUPs stuff himself while we worked out what it was, and when we did, he informed me that a compiler bug prevents the feature from working on a Mac Mini (works fine on my Mac Pro.) He also informed me it wasn't going to be fixed. I had to fix THAT problem by buying a new mac mini that used a later processor, and that in turn forced an OS upgrade, and that turn screwed me other ways. And all I bloody wanted was for printing to work! (This was for a point of sale application for the Mini where I had to print Chinese from a Python application as well as English. No UTF-8 == no Chinese.) My Safari leaks memory like a sieve with a hole in it -- a few hours use results in over 4 GIGABYTES of memory use that comes back the instant I quit Safari, every time. My OSX has a bug deep in the color balance/render routines that causes somewhat regular hangs of very busy graphics programs. And so on.
Wanting these things fixed is not about wanting "new feature X", it's about wanting feature C, which was supposed to be there in the first place.
Now, one or more of these may (may!) be fixed in 10.7 or later. But 10.6 is the last version of OSX that supports PPC applications, of which I have a large number, and for which I paid a great deal of money all in all, AND which are still very useful to me. So you see, the idea of leaving 10.6 around, broken, not performing as advertised, is not an issue of wanting "future" features. I just want it to work as it was supposed to.
No. You can pretty much count on the fact that almost nothing I propose depends on legislation. That well has been completely poisoned.
In this instance, I'd like to see consumers realize they are being repeatedly screwed w/o lube, and hold the OS and app vendor's feet to the fire in the traditional way: by voting with their wallet.
I know the odds perfectly well. That's how I feel anyway.
No, he didn't "steal" them from copeland. Hell, even AmigaDOS had desktop widgetry by late 1986. And more.
The point is, it wasn't an Apple innovation by any stretch of the imagination.
What if that could save you money? (it can.) What if it adds convenience and security? (it can.) What if it informs you about your usage such that you can improve your comfort level? (it can.) What if it gives you remote information, such as "the heater has failed, the pipes will freeze, you need to come deal with this" (it can.) What then? Still no business being Internet enabled?
It's not a failure of needlessly Internetting the device; it's a failure of vision on your part (and perhaps a failure on the manufacturer's part to make a secure device... that can be fixed, and pressure should be applied so the fix happens.) Sure, you can get along with your old thermostat. You could get along with a coal stove instead of a gas or electric range, too. But most of the time, not such a good idea.
The problem isn't accessibility. That's just a stopgap, though certainly a highly effective one. The real problem is security. Worthy of raving about, for sure. But with the idea of making it actually secure -- not of dumping capability out the window because of too little effort expended.
<RANT>
One thing that's causing problems is the habit of Apple and Microsoft to abandon operating systems for new, often incompatible ones, instead of fixing the bugs in them. OSX 10.6.8 is full of problems; the only way to fix them is to move up to OSX 10.7 or further, which in turn can break a lot of things, because the later release isn't just fixed (if, in fact, it is fixed), it's a different animal altogether. Just one example. OS vendors take the view that you can either move forward with them, or die in a fire. Windows, Ubuntu, XP, etc... same deal.
I'm not saying these old OS's should get new features. But bugs? They should be fixed as long as humanly possible. The product was sold as having feature set X, and working. If it doesn't work as advertised, or is unreliable, it shouldn't be abandoned, it should be fixed. Except in the very rare case where it is not possible (I can't even think of one of those, actually.)
The problem is multifaceted. It isn't just that users are left with a choice of being left behind and becoming steadily more vulnerable to exploits; it is also that as the OS vendors keep jumping away from their buggy versions, the OS landscape, as it were, is left lettered with broken junk, and the new stuff is going to also be broken in new ways (plus, often, the old ways too), because:
None of these OS vendors ever intends to work any product into shape such that it becomes stable, reliable, and actually what it was advertised to be when it was sold. Instead, hey, look over here, New! Shiny!
Then we have application vendors that, for no particular good reason, make their apps not just use, but depend upon new OS features. Generally speaking, you don't have to do that. You can tie a feature to an OS, and there are very good reasons to do so (the feature may not even be possible under a previous one), but then there are things that have no sane reason to be tied to an OS, such as the ability to load a new image format (Apple, I'm thinking of Aperture here.) New interface to load images through? Sure, great idea. Abandoning the old interface? Not generally a sensible thing to do. No doubt there are applications out there that use the old interface, and there will be users with (shock!) new cameras.
I find the entire cycle of abandonment to be reprehensible and ethically bankrupt. I think applications should be maintained until they aren't broken under the OS's they were designed to run under, and OS's should be maintained until they work in every way they were supposed to in the first place, and are kept as secure as possible without actually breaking things. But that's just me.
</RANT>
It's not that much of an illusion. Qt's done some useful work there. I've written one app, quite complex, that runs under both Windows and OSX. The only serious work I had to do was related to USB support, which Qt really hasn't addressed worth a darn. Everything else, though, is just a recompile specifying the target. Sound, networking, file system, GUI and lower level graphics, etc. The apps are a little less efficient, working as they must through a compatibility layer, but they're efficient enough to do the job at hand on even moderately recent hardware, so I'm pretty happy with the whole approach.
Konfabulator.
Idiot.
No. They aren't. Because they're an arm of the federal government, and all search and seizure by the federal government is formally and unequivocally limited to very specific procedures, which the NSA are not following, by the 4th amendment to the US constitution.
What they are doing is fundamentally illegal, as defined by the very highest law in the land, the very one that authorizes our government to even exist.
Was it your impression that we all live in a banana republic where the government can do anything it wants? Anything congress wants, it gets? That's not how it's supposed to work. When it does work that way, it is broken.
...someone would come up with a calendar standard that measures fractions of a second from approximately the big bang, and on into the heat death of the universe. It's not like bits are expensive, or an add with carry is only an instruction found with some CPUs.
Be nice to have something we don't have to replace over and over again, and which could be used in all manner of scientific and historical endeavors.
100% under-rated.
The day I got ahold of a couple 74181s was the day I started to build my own machine. No cpus available then. Then the 6800 came home, then the (wonderful!) 6809, then the 68000... won a 68k eval board at a tech show... then the Amiga, SO far ahead of its time... 68020, 68040... then Motorola dropped the ball, Intel took the field.... Windows... sigh.
Eventually, OSX (which I love) and Apple (whom I despise.) linux refused to build a standard UI, locked itself out of the same market Windows and OSX were aiming to own (and which they succeeded in owning), so I never used linux for much more than a (very good) server platform. Always thought that was a wrong turn for everyone. linux being so rabidly anti-commercial, that is. The GPL was the ultimate poison pill for success, "eat me" written in pretty colors all over it. And you did. Oh well.
So I made my way in the world with Windows as much as I had to, the Amiga and later OSX as much as I could get away with, and I have to say, it was a great ride. Much of my financial success, such as it was, came from Windows, true enough, but most of my fun was had elsewhere. My fondest memories are from projects built in assembler, C, Python. Although I did a lot of hardware design career-wise, software was so much more fun. Eventually, I just quit doing hardware. Meh.
I see everything closing down now. Malware and black hats turned a wonderful computer revolution into a PITA for everyone, and the manufacturers followed suit by locking down a great deal that used to be open to play with. We got the abortion of an operating system that is IOS, and the pay-to-develop garden that "supports" it. Kind of like how a punji stick supports a person who stepped in the wrong pit.
Pretty much retired now, sorry to see you guys get hit with such a lousy legacy. In our defense, I think most of us didn't think it would go this way.
But perhaps the next tech revolution will be as much fun, or more so, than the beginning of this one was. I was reading about open source robots today. Someone makes the hardware, you plug in your own apps. You people have a chance to make that your own. Don't blow it like you did linux. Open should mean open. Not just "open if you do it my way."
In summary, get off my lawn -- and go do something wonderful.
The problem isn't that perl is old. The problem is that perl reads (and writes) like encrypted sanskrit and is just generally weird in its approach to everything.
Once you've invested a great deal of time learning it, and its APIs, it's a big deal to change, because you're effective in it... but, speaking from personal experience, after years of perl-ing, I tried something else, and what a revelation it was. Not everyone is willing to put in the kind of effort it takes, and familiarity itself can make nice seem wrongish after years of coding otherwise.
For new entries to the scripting language world, the only really good reason to learn perl is to maintain legacy code. Updates can't fix it -- the very language is a mess. And the fact is, there are some really terrific scripting languages out there now. There's little -- or no -- need to subject one's self to perl.
We don't know that. We *do* know that generally speaking, unless we're interested in the behavior at the molecular level, systems can be modeled at higher levels than their molecular makeup. That's the point. It remains valid in regards to the brain.
You have no basis for the assumption that it cannot be properly modeled, nor even a basis for how much of it needs to be modeled, if any, in order to achieve AI.
Everything that we do know what is on this earth, though, fall squarely into the physics we've developed up to now. Not divinity; not soul; not zombies; not fields or waves of an unknown kind. The implication is *extremely* strong that this will continue with everything we study, and we have every reason to presume this about cells created under the guidance of DNA. We know a *lot* about such cells all across the animal kingdom, and they're neither magical in operation nor is there any evidence at all that they are drawing upon presently unknown forces. The rational conclusion is that brain cells of every type are the same; that temporal, chemical, electrical, and topological effects account for 100% of everything they do; and that the emergent macro effects that we call intelligence and consciousness are of precisely the same order that make a collection of machine instructions into a spreadsheet, a video game, or a disk driver. Nature is chock full of things that produce macro effects that are expressions of the sum of their makeup, rather than just the makeup itself. It's both rational and reasonable to proceed as if the brain to be such a system -- because we know of no other kind of system whatsoever. If we discover otherwise, that will be profoundly revelatory -- but there's no sign of this at this time. None.
Because of this incredibly strong grounding that at present suffers no exceptions, this appears by *every* sane metric to be the place to look. In order for an idea that this is outside of our presently known physics to be taken seriously, you first have to demonstrate that there IS something outside of our presently known physics. Otherwise it's just hand-waving. Once you do make such a demonstration, then you have to show how it's relevant to the issues at hand.
No. This is utter bunkum. All ideas are not equal. No supernatural *anything* has been demonstrated to exist. Ever. Period. Ideas without any supporting scientific data should not be considered on anything even remotely like an equal basis with real science; an idea backed by experiential, consensual, repeatable experiment and consistent supporting theory is of almost inestimably more value than an idea that is not. When you begin hand-waving about the "supernatural", you might as well be babbling in tongues; it is literally worthy of zero consideration. If you think that some unknown force is at work, then it's 100% on you to present proof that such a force exists, or to point us to someone else who has done so, before you can expect such ideas to be treated with any more respect than any other kind of story someone made up without anything to back it up (not to mention being in direct conflict with everything we do actually understand.)
Over unity stable fusion is bound to be pretty big, at least initially; the only working examples we have of it are huge. We recently beat break even, and there are ideas out there being implemented that could result in functional over-unity systems, one of which is ITER. And of course, there's always the Farnsworth fusor, and fusion weapons, which are pretty small themselves, all things considered.
The brain isn't all that large; but its complexity and the relative functional difference in size between neurons and glia and so forth as compared to silicon computing and analog elements do indeed make it look like a very large project, even when you discount all the volume taken by the non-intelligent things the brain does (regulates heartbeat, breathing, etc.)
I rather expect AI to be tougher than fusion, frankly. But I still expect it to fall to our insatiable curiosity and innovative capabilities.
You have confused this with the correct statement: "Physics cannot yet explain intelligence, consciousness." Life, though, at least of the common carbon-based earthly kind, is pretty much a solved question.
Everything -- and I do mean *everything* -- we know of is based upon the objective reality that physics and the associated math describe in a quite detailed manner. Those understandings have given us everything from spaceflight to deep observations in space to electronics and every other real understanding of the world. Furthermore, everything we know of that nature has produced has turned out to operate and be constructed under the same physics. There's not a sign of anything else; there's not even a HINT of such a sign.
No other domain -- not philosophy, not religion, not "magic", not anything -- has produced any workable technology or understanding of actual objective reality of any kind. So it seems pretty clear those aren't the places we should be looking for solutions to questions about the brain, which is, after all, a collection of animal cells which are started as growths under the direction of the same genome that built your fingernails -- which also is not magic.
So that whole, "actually, I am wrong"... nope. You have not demonstrated that at all. :)
Was Einstein redundant and of no benefit? Is Hawking? And why? Intelligence.
That's the idea behind AI. More intelligence applied to particular problems will help, just as history clearly shows. So the goal is to make more.
Less fragile intelligence isn't a bad idea either.
Saying "Ai is inevitable" only makes a few assumptions, those being no particular time frame is implied for the achievement, and that there's no such thing as magic.
The observer effect may not be what we thought it was. Likewise, quantum entanglement produces results that appear to be faster than light based on our mundane understanding of distance. As everything we know -- so far -- tells us that can't happen, it may be that we are not observing the same distances, or perhaps even the same systems. But we can *certainly* fully model rates and synchrony (or lack thereof) of information transmission, so even this weirdness this is likely to be a complete non-issue.
Molecular simulation: There is no evidence this is required. One example: You can model a spacecraft trajectory quite simply, and very accurately; you don't need to model the molecules in the spacecraft and the fuel and the energy states of all of them to do it. Another: You can model balance quite simply, and very accurately; you don't need anything but a little math. Another: You can model a pitched baseball, and you don't need a human or an arm to do it. Another: You can closely model electron flow in many circuits without being too worried about the low level details of the materials themselves. And so on.
Emulations and simulations do not generally suffer the requirement to recreate the modeled system at the atomic level, or anywhere near it; instead, emulations and simulations go after the highest level model that will get the job done, and typically, those are *far* above the atomic level. There's no reason at this time to assume that modeling an intelligence would require such a low level approach -- and many reasons to think it won't. One simple relevant example is that a single neuron can already be accurately modeled at a much higher level than molecularly. It may be that the behavior of groups of neurons can as well; we don't know yet. But we *do* know that molecular level emulation isn't going to be called for.
Just remember: you can be almost any combination of blind, deaf, dumb, touchless, tasteless, limbless, and insensible to pain, and still be intelligent.
We know that the human brain computes with the components it is made of. We know those components are mundane in the sense that they're just chemical, electrical, and topological in operation, with a vague, but entirely unproven possibly that there may be quantum effects that are active. (of course quantum effects exist beneath the more macro processes as fundamental building blocks of materials, but presently there's no evidence they're modifying anything going on at a higher level.)
With this information, we can ask: IF we know what structures to build, can be build or fully emulate them? The answer is yes. Now another question arises, that of adequate speed; the answer to that is unknown at this time, but this is a matter of practicality, not actual achievement of the goal. An intelligent answer in 100 years is still an equally intelligent answer to one that comes in seconds; It's just not as useful, or at all.
Your statement that we know "zero" understanding of what creates intelligence is wrong. We have a body of knowledge that both eliminates quite a few ideas, such as the superstitious ones, and we know a lot about local mechanics of some types of brain cells. We have identified specialized regions that clearly do a lot of the work, or mediate the work, in particular areas such as the visual cortex. We know that the brain usually specializes by hemisphere, mostly from unfortunates who have severed or otherwise damaged corpus callosum. We also have some decent ideas of how to educate an intelligence, simply derived from our own. And we know from physics what things in general are made of, and how they behave, at the level of actively affecting one another. We understand electric signals, a great deal about chemical signals, a good bit about chemical receptors, we get that the topology of connectivity is a thing and an important one, and we know that all of that is doable in emulation once we actually know what it is we need to do.
We need to learn a lot more, absolutely, but we are hardly at "zero."
Further: AI may, or may not, arise as a consequence of trying to recreate the human brain. There may be other paths, perhaps many of them. Depends on what intelligence is, which, as you point out, we don't know. For any case that isn't derived from copying the brain, questions about how our brains work become a lot less relevant to the problem, perhaps not at all. Just the way an FPU works is not particularly relevant to how we do math.
Of course it is. Why? Physics. What do I mean by that? Everything -- bar none -- works according to the principles of physics. Nothing, so far, has *ever* been discovered that does not do so. While there is more to be determined about physics, there is no sign of irreproducible magic, which is what luddites must invoke to declare AI "impossible" or even "unlikely." When physics allows us to do something, and we understand what it is we want to do, we have an excellent history of going ahead and doing if there is benefit to be had. And in this case, the benefit is almost incalculable -- almost certainly more than electronics has provided thus far. Socially, technically, productively. The brain is an organic machine, no more, no less. We know this because we have looked very hard at it and found absolutely no "secret sauce" of the form of anything inexplicable.
AI is a tough problem, and no doubt it'll be tough to find the first solution to it; but we do have hints, as in, how other brains are constructed, and so we're not running completely blind here. Also, a lot of people are working on, and interested in, solutions.
The claim that AI will never come is squarely in the class of "flying is impossible", "we'll never break the sound barrier", "there's no way we could have landed on the moon", "the genome is too complex to map", and "no one needs more than 640k." It's just shortsighted (and probably fearful) foolishness, born of superstitious and conceited, hubristic foolishness.
Just like all those things, those who actually understand science will calmly watch as progress puts this episode of "it's impossible!" to bed. It's a long running show, though, and I'm sure we'll continue to be roundly entertained by these naysayers.
Yet still following Frederick Pohl's "Age of the Pussyfoot", ca. 1969, wherein a fireman, badly burned, is suspended as no tech is yet available to remediate his injuries.
In this book, Pohl not only covers suspension for later remediation, but also basically describes the modern cellphone, although ours don't have quite as many features as his does. Yet. :) Also some other very cool tech and social ideas.
There are quite a few great ideas that you might think came out of the 80's and 90's SF writers minds, but were roundly preceded by the first round of masters, of which Pohl was certainly one.
Nuke the damn thing from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
The demographic for Fox News viewers is mainly old folks. If this study were true, the demographic for Fox News viewers would be dead people.