If the group represented a large enough collection of stockholders, maybe 5% or 10%, they could probably compel Apple to change through the courts to make the cheapest decision rather than a morally-guided decision.
It is the cheapest decision. The bad publicity for a company that isn't green and doesn't support the handicapped is truly a bad deal, financially speaking.
If Apple were in the least interested in taking a morally guided path, they wouldn't leave one in five of their users exposed to hackers; they'd likely consider it an actual obligation to fix the broken OSX (and iOS, for that matter) products they've sold to people instead of leaving them stuck with busted-ware, regardless of version or age -- instead, they blunder forward, ignoring old bugs and leaving customers exposed while spewing out new ones. It is outright nuts to ever assume Apple is on the more moral or ethical path. I can hardly think of a company more hard-nosed, more vicious with regard to customer risk and harm, or more straight-up all about the money.
Yeah, I'm an Apple user. No, it isn't always a viable option to upgrade to the next or latest and greatest OSX. Apple tends to break the living hell out of previously working operations between upgrades, and quite a few users can't just break machines without consequences.
PS -- I'm not attempting to make Apple look any worse than anyone else here, it's just Apple I'm most familiar with in recent years. I still remember Microsoft leaving the bloody file dialog code broken as living hell for many releases and revisions, and I can quote you some very persistent Qt bugs as well. It's just that reading a statement crediting Apple with taking the "morally guided path" made me spit coffee.
That's a good analogy, but it fails because a single citizen can't "own" a senator.
Until you said this, I thought you were talking about the US system. Here, owning a legislator is strictly a matter of money and the ability to spread it around quietly.
You fall for a common fallacy here: We do not understand intelligence at all.
No, I don't fall for any such thing. I make that exact point. Read again.
they cannot identify any non-physical phenomenon.
....nor is there any reason -- at all -- to postulate the existence of such a thing until we have ruled out the physical; and since we know the physical is real, and that the brain is physical, and that its workings are, thus far, entirely known to be physical, there is every reason to expect that when we do understand what it does, we'll find the answer the same place humankind has found EVERY other answer ever in our history: in the physical world. Your position is 100% identical with "I don't understand it, so it must be some force I cannot see." Before that answer can be taken seriously, we must reach "We have examined, and completely understand, all physicality and have not found thought or intelligence in any of its workings -- there MUST be something invisible. We're not even close to that point; so the presumption that there is an invisible, unknown force is wholly premature.
But the brain is an analog computer and every quantum effect has an influence on its workings.
Objective data argues otherwise. I can sit in the presence of an enormously strong RF and/or magnetic field that permeates my body, and I can think just fine. Were anything as touchy as quantum effects acting as active mediators in my thought, I would be reduced to a vegetable, or perhaps hallucinate wildly. People work in such environments all day long, every day, and their brains just keep on doing exactly what they usually do. Likewise, physical motion causes all manner of slight stresses to the physical structure of the brain, and yet, it keeps on working. All of this -- and more -- argues for an extremely robust system that is immune to all but the most profound effects. Likewise, the common and eminently predictable effect of a huge range of drugs, injury, surgery upon consciousness and the brain's physicality argues for mundane physicality. Whatever is going on responds in a most typical, physical way. The obvious conclusion -- possibly wrong, but as I said, not the way to bet -- is that it, itself, is physical in the sense that everything else is.
Come on, this is beginners stuff. Do you really claim you do not see that fundamental difference?
Please. Do not mistake my position for an uninformed one. That would be a very large mistake.
Buying a home, for instance, can result in saving more money each month in rent than you're paying in interest.
Yeah, but hanging with mom and dad until you can *buy* a home will save you *far* more. Renting isn't the only financial option; it's just another bad one.
Yep, there's just no underestimating human perfidy, greed and the ability to repress compassion.
I often wonder what the consequences would be of all those people actually doing something productive with all that time. Doesn't bother me, exactly, but the idea does settle into my cynical side pretty cleanly.
I'm simply aware that competence in one area does not imply competence in others, and when intelligence gets out on the edges of the Gaussian, both social and organic factors come into play to cause people's behaviors and core competencies to settle far outside the norms.
The savant is an extreme, yet clear example of this. If you simply settle down and think about it, you'll see it. Or, you can keep pointing and laughing. Your call.
I said they have already figured out how to reverse aging.
So you did. The statement is so outside of my knowledge base I actually read it wrong. I apologize.
So, do you have a citation for this assertion? Anything? I did some googling, not wanting to look like a complete idiot (satisfied with partial idiocy), but found nothing. Info, please?
There are serious indications it is not, such as the consistent failure of all research so far to produce true intelligence
Since no one has been able to define what thinking is, I'm reluctant to class attempts to produce it via what amount to moderately sophisticated hand-waving based on guesses as definitive WRT physicality.
And then we have this: Everything we do understand -- bar none -- in this world obeys physics, and produces results as a consequence of well understood causal mechanisms. Postulating that "something else" is at work here seems, at the very least, highly premature, considering that there is no objective evidence for any such thing. Anywhere. Could it be so? Yes. Is that the way to bet? Not at this time, it's not.
Also note that the only valid for of a technological artifact emulating a brain would be a quantum computer as there is lots and lots of quantum effects in synapses
No. Quantum effects are also at work in every transistor; but the transistor operates on large scale currents and voltages, and to model the transistor's performance sufficiently to get done what it does in emulation, you don't need to deal with it at the quantum level, or even consider it. It is fair to say that this is true at most levels: quantum effects are at work when you throw a baseball at almost every step of the operation, but we can still create a baseball-throwing arm that works entirely differently, yet throws the same ball the same way. Or emulation of same. Bottom line, until someone can show that thoughts vary due to quantum effects that are active in the process, as opposed to inherent in the process, there's no reason to think that a quantum computer, or an emulation of one, will be required.
I disagree: there would be several dozen post-operation mini-deaths where we didn't feel or act "the same anymore" to our peers or to ourselves.
Do you die when you incorporate a new life philosophy, or when you internalize any large change in how you approach things? Or when you truly realize you've been quite wrong about something? If you don't, then why would small changes (regardless of cause) be equal to death? If you do, then have you truly decided your definition of death is a "bad" thing?
No, but we're not going to have the first (or any) version of this concept work flawlessly.
Now you're just playing the futurist game yourself. You have no data on this; you don't know what form it will take, how it would go about achieving the desired goal, it's not a current technology, hence you have no data from which to derive expected performance. Doesn't inspire me to "blindly swoon" over your prediction, either.
It's a huge problem, much larger than the individual - a composite form of pattern acquisition, storage, search and association that deals with modeling all our senses, modeling our cognition, self-awareness, ethics, history, etc. I
Many parts of the problem, though, are either already solved or irrelevant. For instance, we have touch sensors, heat sensors, smell sensors, taste sensors, vision sensors, propriaceptive sensors, and hearing sensors on the input side (plus many others not in the human sensorium); on the output side, we have speech synthesis, limbs, hands, feet, faces, torsos, and integration of all of these as a body. So this area is no more than mundane engineering.
On the brain function side of things, there are many brainops/organops we don't have to reproduce, and so do not present a problem. Heart regulation, breathing, hormone levels, blood chemistry, temperature regulation, except again in the most mundane as-they-apply to any chunk of combined mechanics and electronics. We've also got n-dimensional associative memory figured out, and furthermore it works considerably better than the human version.
In fact, it appears that there is exactly one problem that stands out as unsolved: thinking. We don't know what it is, in the sense that we can't even describe it, much less replicate it. Thinking, in turn, is likely to encompass consciousness (there's no evidence for any other process, so that's the logical conclusion at this point. That might change, should we discover another activity going on other than thinking per se.)
The means to producing thinking will, if we manage it, all by itself be the instantiation of everything truly AI.
I would also point out that the human version of intelligence is certainly not the only possible version, and so the presumption that human senses and effectors will be required is highly dubious. Further, a blind, deaf, etc. from birth human can still think, so it is very clear that presuming the requirement of a fully human sensorium and/or effector capability is specious right out of the gate.
...and Einstein rarely got his socks and shoes on right, and his relationships with women were awful. What's your point? That you don't understand genius? That's axiomatic, truly.
We invented that some time ago. There are multiple forms, all of them infectious, often incurable, particularly when caught by young humans. Some of the more virulent are nationalism, racial prejudice, religion, and NIH.
It is just that Ray Kurzweil has no idea what AI can and cannot do and has ignored the relevant research for decades.
Few things. "The relevant research", as you put it, has not produced AI or even the shadow of AI. So it may well be that Kurzweil's "ignoring it" (as you put it... I doubt he actually is doing that, more likely he's simply not taking it as a limit) for a reason. There are many instances of traditional AI research falling off the rails, some obvious, like Minsky's incorrect assessment of the limits of neural networks, and some not so obvious, like Chalmer's (unsupported, hand-waving) presumption that consciousness is something apart from mundane aggregate brain operations (thought.) Lastly, Kurzweil has a record of significant accomplishments across multiple disciplines that consensus regards as genius level events. You, I'm not so sure of. So I hope you'll pardon me if I appreciate that he's approaching the problem from any angle, while not worrying too much about what your opinion is of his efforts at this point.
your plea for enough CPU time to continue being conscious?
1) There is no magic
2) The brain is made of structures that can be emulated as to function and connectivity
3) Emulation of any known function can be done in traditional von Neuman architecture given the proper software
4) number and speed of clocks available does not change the outcome (in this case, consciousness), it only changes the rate of outcome.
So. If you were clock-starved, as it were, you'd run slow. And probably enjoy the company of your peers the most. Other clock-starved folk.
If you were clock-rich, you'd run fast. And probably enjoy the company of your peers the most. Other clock-rich folk.
Stacks up pretty much as it always has, seems to me: The rich will get actually richer, the poor will get significantly poorer relative to the rich, while slowly getting richer anyway. Classes will arise inherent to the process.
The thing that might actually hurt you is being short on memory, not clocks. "You" can't exist without a great deal of stored and related information. IMHO. I really don't think I'd be "me" without my experience base, knowledge, etc.
Having said that, I rather doubt you'll be short on memory. But that's only my guess.
It knows based on how many fingers are touching the screen
Which will vary randomly as the vehicle bounces, and there will be an undependable input, not to mention taking your attention and your hands off the vehicle controls. This touchscreen idea should be DOA.
You have obviously never driven any distance in a noisy vehicle.
Wrong. I'm also quite familiar with phase/amplitude noise cancelation by sampling the environment away from the audio pickup. It takes engineering, but it's 100% doable. Engineers can solve these problems (they already have, actually.)
No, but absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Which is a much more powerful and useful construct. Yours allows for the Easter Bunny. Mine argues against it. See how that works?
Ah yes, "c". We all now the ugly reality, aren't we?
Now? No. That was then. Python is now. No $need; for {any} of $_ this blessed crap attempting to be classy; We all knew God was a shitty designer anyway. No wonder he used Perl.
Coffee. Fingerprints. Greasy French Fry prints. Rather use my hand to drive the vehicle. Hold hands with my lady.
Also, that Garmin GPS? Talks to my phone by bluetooth. Don't have to touch or look at my phone, either.
Touchscreens totally suck. Everywhere. No exceptions. Even the iPad, best touchscreen ever, sucks. Still fingerprints. Still uses completely opaque "gestures" to do things I have no idea I was "asking" for. Requires looking. But you know what? I can TALK to my iPad. Writing's on the wall, vehicle makers. Speech is it, period, end of story, get on that, dammit.
Here's the problem, vehicle designers
on
A New Car UI
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Cars and trucks and motorcycles bounce. Plus, we can't always be looking. See, so we can't always control where we're touching it; we can't even always control how many fingers we put down.
We need to be able to talk to these systems. My Garmin GPS does this. I don't have to touch it. I say "voice command" and off we go. No touching. Bouncing doesn't matter. I don't have to look.
Until you get to this level of interface, you're doing it wrong, and furthermore, as of this point in time, you're also behind the curve, because others are doing it right.
Thanks for this, slashdot, just this morning I was cursing at a touch interface in my vehicle.
Yep, but that external world could be a simulation.
Personally, if I had my own simulation, there would be a god, and it'd be me. I'm sure it'd run slower because of all the omniscient stuff that would have to go an about intent and action, but it'd be worth it to strike evildoers with lightning every time they got out of line. Anyway, slower or not, no one in the simulation would know, because they'd measure time by their own perceptions and environment, which, of course, would also be running slower.
Trolling is trolling - posting something simply to be disruptive and irritate people. It doesn't matter why it's done or if the troll thinks there is some greater point to it.
Yes. However, there is bad trolling -- interfering with legitimate discourse -- and there is good trolling -- baiting idiots like birthers, creationists, dimwits who think congress is full of stand-up personalities... trolling those people is pure entertainment, yet serves an important social purpose by keeping many of them at a time glued to their keyboards talking about how "Barry" is going to take their guns, etc.
There's trolling, and there's trolling. The one is despicable, the other a public service.
Slashdot Mirror
It is the cheapest decision. The bad publicity for a company that isn't green and doesn't support the handicapped is truly a bad deal, financially speaking.
If Apple were in the least interested in taking a morally guided path, they wouldn't leave one in five of their users exposed to hackers; they'd likely consider it an actual obligation to fix the broken OSX (and iOS, for that matter) products they've sold to people instead of leaving them stuck with busted-ware, regardless of version or age -- instead, they blunder forward, ignoring old bugs and leaving customers exposed while spewing out new ones. It is outright nuts to ever assume Apple is on the more moral or ethical path. I can hardly think of a company more hard-nosed, more vicious with regard to customer risk and harm, or more straight-up all about the money.
Yeah, I'm an Apple user. No, it isn't always a viable option to upgrade to the next or latest and greatest OSX. Apple tends to break the living hell out of previously working operations between upgrades, and quite a few users can't just break machines without consequences.
PS -- I'm not attempting to make Apple look any worse than anyone else here, it's just Apple I'm most familiar with in recent years. I still remember Microsoft leaving the bloody file dialog code broken as living hell for many releases and revisions, and I can quote you some very persistent Qt bugs as well. It's just that reading a statement crediting Apple with taking the "morally guided path" made me spit coffee.
Until you said this, I thought you were talking about the US system. Here, owning a legislator is strictly a matter of money and the ability to spread it around quietly.
No, I don't fall for any such thing. I make that exact point. Read again.
Objective data argues otherwise. I can sit in the presence of an enormously strong RF and/or magnetic field that permeates my body, and I can think just fine. Were anything as touchy as quantum effects acting as active mediators in my thought, I would be reduced to a vegetable, or perhaps hallucinate wildly. People work in such environments all day long, every day, and their brains just keep on doing exactly what they usually do. Likewise, physical motion causes all manner of slight stresses to the physical structure of the brain, and yet, it keeps on working. All of this -- and more -- argues for an extremely robust system that is immune to all but the most profound effects. Likewise, the common and eminently predictable effect of a huge range of drugs, injury, surgery upon consciousness and the brain's physicality argues for mundane physicality. Whatever is going on responds in a most typical, physical way. The obvious conclusion -- possibly wrong, but as I said, not the way to bet -- is that it, itself, is physical in the sense that everything else is.
Please. Do not mistake my position for an uninformed one. That would be a very large mistake.
Yeah, but hanging with mom and dad until you can *buy* a home will save you *far* more. Renting isn't the only financial option; it's just another bad one.
Yep, there's just no underestimating human perfidy, greed and the ability to repress compassion.
I often wonder what the consequences would be of all those people actually doing something productive with all that time. Doesn't bother me, exactly, but the idea does settle into my cynical side pretty cleanly.
I'm simply aware that competence in one area does not imply competence in others, and when intelligence gets out on the edges of the Gaussian, both social and organic factors come into play to cause people's behaviors and core competencies to settle far outside the norms.
The savant is an extreme, yet clear example of this. If you simply settle down and think about it, you'll see it. Or, you can keep pointing and laughing. Your call.
So you did. The statement is so outside of my knowledge base I actually read it wrong. I apologize.
So, do you have a citation for this assertion? Anything? I did some googling, not wanting to look like a complete idiot (satisfied with partial idiocy), but found nothing. Info, please?
Since no one has been able to define what thinking is, I'm reluctant to class attempts to produce it via what amount to moderately sophisticated hand-waving based on guesses as definitive WRT physicality.
And then we have this: Everything we do understand -- bar none -- in this world obeys physics, and produces results as a consequence of well understood causal mechanisms. Postulating that "something else" is at work here seems, at the very least, highly premature, considering that there is no objective evidence for any such thing. Anywhere. Could it be so? Yes. Is that the way to bet? Not at this time, it's not.
No. Quantum effects are also at work in every transistor; but the transistor operates on large scale currents and voltages, and to model the transistor's performance sufficiently to get done what it does in emulation, you don't need to deal with it at the quantum level, or even consider it. It is fair to say that this is true at most levels: quantum effects are at work when you throw a baseball at almost every step of the operation, but we can still create a baseball-throwing arm that works entirely differently, yet throws the same ball the same way. Or emulation of same. Bottom line, until someone can show that thoughts vary due to quantum effects that are active in the process, as opposed to inherent in the process, there's no reason to think that a quantum computer, or an emulation of one, will be required.
Do you die when you incorporate a new life philosophy, or when you internalize any large change in how you approach things? Or when you truly realize you've been quite wrong about something? If you don't, then why would small changes (regardless of cause) be equal to death? If you do, then have you truly decided your definition of death is a "bad" thing?
Now you're just playing the futurist game yourself. You have no data on this; you don't know what form it will take, how it would go about achieving the desired goal, it's not a current technology, hence you have no data from which to derive expected performance. Doesn't inspire me to "blindly swoon" over your prediction, either.
Many parts of the problem, though, are either already solved or irrelevant. For instance, we have touch sensors, heat sensors, smell sensors, taste sensors, vision sensors, propriaceptive sensors, and hearing sensors on the input side (plus many others not in the human sensorium); on the output side, we have speech synthesis, limbs, hands, feet, faces, torsos, and integration of all of these as a body. So this area is no more than mundane engineering.
On the brain function side of things, there are many brainops/organops we don't have to reproduce, and so do not present a problem. Heart regulation, breathing, hormone levels, blood chemistry, temperature regulation, except again in the most mundane as-they-apply to any chunk of combined mechanics and electronics. We've also got n-dimensional associative memory figured out, and furthermore it works considerably better than the human version.
In fact, it appears that there is exactly one problem that stands out as unsolved: thinking. We don't know what it is, in the sense that we can't even describe it, much less replicate it. Thinking, in turn, is likely to encompass consciousness (there's no evidence for any other process, so that's the logical conclusion at this point. That might change, should we discover another activity going on other than thinking per se.)
The means to producing thinking will, if we manage it, all by itself be the instantiation of everything truly AI.
I would also point out that the human version of intelligence is certainly not the only possible version, and so the presumption that human senses and effectors will be required is highly dubious. Further, a blind, deaf, etc. from birth human can still think, so it is very clear that presuming the requirement of a fully human sensorium and/or effector capability is specious right out of the gate.
You think they'll solve aging... but not disease?
Interesting set of assumptions, there. Can't say I buy it.
Because he's orders of magnitude smarter than you?
He is many things, some of them outstandingly odd, but "idiot" isn't one of them. Which renders your analysis baseless.
...and Einstein rarely got his socks and shoes on right, and his relationships with women were awful. What's your point? That you don't understand genius? That's axiomatic, truly.
We invented that some time ago. There are multiple forms, all of them infectious, often incurable, particularly when caught by young humans. Some of the more virulent are nationalism, racial prejudice, religion, and NIH.
Few things. "The relevant research", as you put it, has not produced AI or even the shadow of AI. So it may well be that Kurzweil's "ignoring it" (as you put it... I doubt he actually is doing that, more likely he's simply not taking it as a limit) for a reason. There are many instances of traditional AI research falling off the rails, some obvious, like Minsky's incorrect assessment of the limits of neural networks, and some not so obvious, like Chalmer's (unsupported, hand-waving) presumption that consciousness is something apart from mundane aggregate brain operations (thought.) Lastly, Kurzweil has a record of significant accomplishments across multiple disciplines that consensus regards as genius level events. You, I'm not so sure of. So I hope you'll pardon me if I appreciate that he's approaching the problem from any angle, while not worrying too much about what your opinion is of his efforts at this point.
1) There is no magic
2) The brain is made of structures that can be emulated as to function and connectivity
3) Emulation of any known function can be done in traditional von Neuman architecture given the proper software
4) number and speed of clocks available does not change the outcome (in this case, consciousness), it only changes the rate of outcome.
So. If you were clock-starved, as it were, you'd run slow. And probably enjoy the company of your peers the most. Other clock-starved folk.
If you were clock-rich, you'd run fast. And probably enjoy the company of your peers the most. Other clock-rich folk.
Stacks up pretty much as it always has, seems to me: The rich will get actually richer, the poor will get significantly poorer relative to the rich, while slowly getting richer anyway. Classes will arise inherent to the process.
The thing that might actually hurt you is being short on memory, not clocks. "You" can't exist without a great deal of stored and related information. IMHO. I really don't think I'd be "me" without my experience base, knowledge, etc.
Having said that, I rather doubt you'll be short on memory. But that's only my guess.
Avoid it? We're in it. The question is can we get out of it.
Which will vary randomly as the vehicle bounces, and there will be an undependable input, not to mention taking your attention and your hands off the vehicle controls. This touchscreen idea should be DOA.
Wrong. I'm also quite familiar with phase/amplitude noise cancelation by sampling the environment away from the audio pickup. It takes engineering, but it's 100% doable. Engineers can solve these problems (they already have, actually.)
No, but absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Which is a much more powerful and useful construct. Yours allows for the Easter Bunny. Mine argues against it. See how that works?
Now? No. That was then. Python is now. No $need; for {any} of $_ this blessed crap attempting to be classy; We all knew God was a shitty designer anyway. No wonder he used Perl.
Coffee. Fingerprints. Greasy French Fry prints. Rather use my hand to drive the vehicle. Hold hands with my lady.
Also, that Garmin GPS? Talks to my phone by bluetooth. Don't have to touch or look at my phone, either.
Touchscreens totally suck. Everywhere. No exceptions. Even the iPad, best touchscreen ever, sucks. Still fingerprints. Still uses completely opaque "gestures" to do things I have no idea I was "asking" for. Requires looking. But you know what? I can TALK to my iPad. Writing's on the wall, vehicle makers. Speech is it, period, end of story, get on that, dammit.
Cars and trucks and motorcycles bounce . Plus, we can't always be looking. See, so we can't always control where we're touching it; we can't even always control how many fingers we put down.
We need to be able to talk to these systems. My Garmin GPS does this. I don't have to touch it. I say "voice command" and off we go. No touching. Bouncing doesn't matter. I don't have to look.
Until you get to this level of interface, you're doing it wrong, and furthermore, as of this point in time, you're also behind the curve, because others are doing it right.
Thanks for this, slashdot, just this morning I was cursing at a touch interface in my vehicle.
Yep, but that external world could be a simulation.
Personally, if I had my own simulation, there would be a god, and it'd be me. I'm sure it'd run slower because of all the omniscient stuff that would have to go an about intent and action, but it'd be worth it to strike evildoers with lightning every time they got out of line. Anyway, slower or not, no one in the simulation would know, because they'd measure time by their own perceptions and environment, which, of course, would also be running slower.
And of course, I'd write it in, uh, c. :)
Yes. However, there is bad trolling -- interfering with legitimate discourse -- and there is good trolling -- baiting idiots like birthers, creationists, dimwits who think congress is full of stand-up personalities... trolling those people is pure entertainment, yet serves an important social purpose by keeping many of them at a time glued to their keyboards talking about how "Barry" is going to take their guns, etc.
There's trolling, and there's trolling. The one is despicable, the other a public service.
Troll! :)