But this is a constitutional republic, and as such, the federal government is authorized by the constitution to use overbearing enforcement means to go just so far, and no further. The fact that they have gone much further than they have been authorized to go is not a matter for the population to vote on, it is outright malfeasance by the feds at large, explicit oath-breaking on the part of officeholders like the president of the United States, and conspiracy on the part of congress. At this point in time, we are not faced with voting decisions; we are faced with outright criminal activity by the federal government.
your negative perspective has overwhelmed reality and distorted it
It is not "perspective" that the commerce clause has been inverted. It explicitly tells the feds they may regulate commerce between the states. The feds are using a sophist, absurd argument they derive from reasoning about the commerce clause we wouldn't accept from a three-year old to justify regulating commerce within the states. It is not "perspective" that the citizen's rights to keep and bear arms have been infringed; the feds infringe those rights far and wide, and somewhat ironically, they use arms on us to do it. It is not "perspective" that the feds are censoring our speech; the FCC, an arm of the federal government, flails about with a heavy hand when speech wanders into areas where it doesn't want it to go, citizens are ejected and barred from political gatherings, "free speech zones" are used to constrain the dissemination of dissenting opinion. It is not "perspective" that the feds are subjecting citizens to arrest without hearing, search and seizure without probable cause, oath or affirmation or warrant, ex post facto laws and punishments, theft of land for commercial interests. It is not "perspective" that 1 in 100 citizens are incarcerated, nor is it "perspective" that a huge number of them are suffering this fate for engaging in personal acts, or consensual acts between adults. It is not "perspective" that congress is making law on a regular basis that is not in the citizen's best interests; it is not "perspective" that the president is issuing "signing statements" that says he is not subject to the laws that congress makes.
These things are facts. They're not "perspective" or perception gleaned from "partisan sites." They are just some of the signs that the federal government now comprises the "bad big brother" that we have been warned many times, by many people, that it might one day become. Consequently, your argument that the grandparent poster's "negative perspective has overwhelmed reality and distorted it" is baseless and contradicts actual reality.
Many years ago, my father told me that a good reason not to use expletives in casual speech is that you won't have anything effectively shocking left to use as emphasis if and when the need arises. I was 16 at the time, and though I should have listened just because he was a writer by trade (and a Hugo-winning one at that), I found that his point made sense in and of itself. I took it to heart without having to look for additional justification.
In the last decade or so (I'm 50-ish), I find the urge to use expletives arises less and less (and consequently their impact with people who know me is rising), but this in no way implies that I fork over the right to the government to tell me what I can say, and who, or to people of what age, I can say it to, regardless of venue. As far as I am concerned, the FCC is engaged in unconstitutional and therefore unauthorized (and impossible to authorize without a constitutional amendment) behavior. Which does tend to cause the urge to spew a few expletives to arise.
The slashblurb that references the article says "Astrology... is a flawed mental shortcut for understanding the world... so is disregarding someone because of their spiritual beliefs" and then, in a glorious fit of politically correct snake-eats-tail, it says "smart people can convince themselves of silly things."
Political correctness, that social disease where people are encouraged to ignore the dragon* in the room for the sake of harmony and at the expense of everything else no matter how critical, is the operating mechanism here. Honestly religious people are gullible at best, and simply bewildered at worst. They're in precisely the same boat as the astrologically inclined, the homeopaths, and a long and depressing list of others.
When it comes to who one should date, I suspect that comes down to what one can tolerate, and that in turn is likely to be related to the length of the relationship. I could spend an evening with someone who thought almost anything. Sometimes you end up doing so as part of a larger group rather than by any kind of informed choice. Likewise, you can't always know what someone thinks about such issues without talking to them for a while unless your social style is more similar to interrogation than conversation (and in which case, you probably don't get to date very often.) Some people may be easily talked out of delusions; they may have simply been victims of the school systems and their peers. It seems to me that for these reasons, dating isn't a very practical place to draw a line in the sand.
For my life partner, however, I very carefully chose a declared and demonstrated strong atheist and skeptic; she took considerable effort to find, but it was absolutely worth the candle. For me, in such a relationship, beliefs like astrology, religion and so forth would be like acid eating away at the foundations. I have a strong conviction that looking at the world in as similar a way as possible brings the ever-elusive goal of perfect harmony a good deal closer. That, and a healthy mutual dose of lust.:)
Sorry, no. There are a number of systems right here on earth that can't be accurately described or modeled with the Newtonian approach. GPS is a significant example that a very large number of people use and depend upon; Almost anything to do with photons or electron flow serves as well, from transistors to lasers and so on. Newton's models -- not "laws" -- are flawed, just as is any model that fails to account for actual reality, and only accounts for a simplified or limited version. Relativity is flawed as well; ask anyone doing work with issues at the quantum level (or simply read Einstein's remarks on the subject.) Quantum mechanics too, the other way around. There is no set of "laws" as yet, there are just some approximations that work at various scales when one can honestly say that the failures of these models aren't significant.
How many laws have been reversed because they were found to be unconstitutional?
More to the point, how many have not, and how many people have been harmed by this?
How long has it been since the meaning of the commerce clause was inverted? How long since they began passing ex post facto laws? How long since the right to keep and carry arms has been infringed? How long have they been carrying on a war against people's personal, consensual choices? When we start talking about periods of fifty years, you've lost me on that whole "it takes time to work." Unacceptable.
My feeling is that if the system can't correct itself over a matter of decades, then the potential for harm by rogue laws (and rogue lawmakers, and rogue enforcers) is far too great. From this, I conclude that the system itself is thoroughly broken. It is not acceptable for people to be harmed by congress, the executive, and the courts exerting powers they have no authority to exert.
Also - in a system where the government is allowed to hide who is harmed by their various out of bounds, unauthorized infliction of rogue legislation, it is not acceptable to have to demonstrate harm to one's self. If that is to be the standard, then the law in question MUST be completely transparent in its application. This whole "You can't challenge phone / wire / network taps because you can't show you've been tapped because the government won't say" is a complete and utter line of nonsense.
The US legal system is being managed by criminals. Who says so? The constitution says so.
All of that is true, but given that, it is *still* more efficient to load from least accessible to most accessible. Dithering and foolishness causes more harm at the front of the plane with the back empty than it does at the back with nearer rows loading without having to pass the ditherer; loading back to front increases the likelihood of such activity occurring near the target seat. it really is obvious. But it isn't financially, socially or politically correct, so it isn't going to happen.
...and in other critical science news, running to your destination gets you there sooner than walking there.
I mean, come on. Loading any empty container from the least accessible to the most accessible area when empty isn't trivially obvious? Did these people fail the square-blocks in round-hole test when they were kids?
Planes aren't loaded funny because the airlines are clueless; planes are loaded funny because the airlines are in the business of creating artificial social classing so that they can generate privileges, and then charge for them. Treat yourself and fly first class one time; you'll see what I mean. There's no other reason for first class to exist, in the sense of getting from here to there. Though I will say that first class in 1970 was a lot more "first" than it is today, what with other social changes that have transpired.
Likewise, old folk, pregnant women, children and invalids aren't loaded first because it is more efficient, they are loaded first because of social pressures (and accompanying income hits) that would arise if they were not given special treatment.
I'll readily agree with your second and third points, but your first depends on the marketplace the company is involved in.
What happens then is they have trouble getting great talent. That's almost always what happens. Because great talent has a strong negative correlation with the ability to endure 4, 6 or even 8 years of boredom.
<HUMOR><HANDWAVING> ...and then you typically end up with exactly the kind of application we associate with the government. It costs way too much, is delivered way too slow, doesn't do what the spec said it was supposed to in the first place, is completely incompatible with everything else ever written by the hand of man or woman, and in the end, gives up your data to someone who walks in a backdoor or even a front door left open by default entry criteria. When the final version is released, the rocket misses mars because module A was metric, and module B was imperial. None of which will matter when the whole thing is stamped classified, though for years, there will be a very small group of people with funny patches on their jackets who exchange knowing looks and snickers when they see each other.
Q: "Why couldn't the program induce lasing in the tuned cavity?"
A: "The whole thing was based on black ops..."
</HANDWAVING></HUMOR>
The real riddle there is why, when they pictures of all the replicants to show Our Hero, was mr interviewer bladerunner guy ignorant of the standard labor model he was talking to until he saw the pupils dilate in a specifically non-human manner? Never could work that out.
The first thing to do is remove arbitrary barriers. IE, "must" have X years of experience, X degree, held X previous positions, must move to our area. That's the sum of major mistakes most operations make. The best programmers in the world don't typically get that way by being just another college / job drone (though some do... just don't slam the door based on mundane requirements - you want the problem solved, not a title you can be proud of.)
Secondly, market the job — make sure people can find out about it. That's perhaps obvious, but I know a lot of companies that try to stick to the back alleys of old boy's clubs, and it's no wonder they can't find anyone. Put an ad, a BIG one, somewhere programmers go a lot. Like slashdot.:-)
Third, salary, salary, salary, and benefits (particularly insurance and family coverage). Move 'em if you have to. We've even bought houses outright for our programming team members. You can't expect to hire a superstar by treating them like a drone.
The problem is almost always that really good programmers don't have to go looking, and if they do, they can - and will - turn their noses up at being treated like a commodity. Yet that's just what most companies do. Plus they throw up arbitrary and unrelated barriers to entry. Unfathomable, really.
i suggest you read the output of man memlock. you clearly don't know enough about linux (or POSIX) to be making generic hand waving comments that appear to be intended to authoritative.
[spits coffee]
Look here, genius, I don't need to read "man memlock" to know that linux will swap out part of my RUNNING APPLICATION in order to cache a stupid web page it could just as easily fetch from the HD (which probably has it cached in RAM also); NOR, as a user, should I be expected to manage such behavior, NOR do I have the time or energy to go in and recompile applications like the Gimp so that they'll operate at a reasonable speed instead of letting the OS take RAM from them. What I NEED, as a USER, is an OS that respects the tasks I am trying to get done and doesn't let the filesystem consume RAM for trivia such as filesystem caching like a crack fiend sucking down their first toke in weeks.
With regard to the Mac, I'm sitting here with 4 gigs of ram right at this moment, with 2.4 gigs FREE, and OS X's activity monitor shows 800+MB of swap in use(!!!), as well as a record of considerable paging going on. You don't need to read the memory allocation docs (NOR should you have to!) to know, as a USER, that this behavior is pathological.
When I say that the OS's aren't handling memory and swap well, I'm not talking about how to write an application to try to manage the OS's shortcomings (which, btw, I've been doing for decades now), I'm talking about actual performance of the OS running real user apps in real world conditions. And none of the big three do a great job when the pressure is on. That's not hand waving; that's a *fact*.
The only way us patent lawyers would actually loose(sic) is if patents were outlawed.
Yes, that's what we're all hoping. Software patents were a terrible, stupid idea. The hope is that the court will overturn the ruling that allowed them, and that patent lawyers can go back to just buggering up the hardware side of things.
No, I *don't* want "human intelligence, not just intelligence." I just want intelligence. I don't even know why some people are so hung up on the idea of "human" intelligence in the first place. Humans have very mixed records (cough) Bush (cough.)
As for the rest, those are your opinions and you are welcome to them, but I don't share them -- any of them. I don't view AI as "stuck", I don't think human grey matter is the limiting definition of where the method of science can come from (it is, after all, a very simple method), and I know for a *fact* that solutions can arise where understanding is less than complete; been there, done that, wore the surprised look.
But I'll share that pizza with you on The Day, however we get there, and whomever does it, using whatever approach.:)
Er, yes.:-) All the verbing of a noun is, in essence, is emphasis. Ball. Fast ball. Dogs and cats do this all the time. Want food! Food is not forthcoming. REALLY want food!
What you're really talking about is the level of abstraction; and that's not something they're going to communicate if they're not doing it in the first place.
...you must have a hugely different definition of "free" than I do.:-)
You cannot program a robot to catch a baseball without first understanding the necessary algorithms.
Yes, you can. You can do it several ways. You can have it learn how by providing error feedback and various inputs and controls. You can do it by approximating various parts of the problem and solving the entire task in pieces, without ever understanding everything that is going on (and in fact, we have to do that, because we don't understand the underlying computer's low-level states when we write our high level code.) And lastly, there are many ways to catch that ball; using a net, using a "hand", using a "glove", using a vacuum, using a horn, etc. Neither the argument nor the analogy holds up.
Unless you use a genetic approach, I guess, but the algorithms that requires are even more complex!
No, they're very easy. I can write you a relatively high speed genetic framework in C in an afternoon; I've already done it and released the result as a commercial product. It ran many thousands of generations per second on 4 MHz 68000 hardware and was indefinitely and trivially extensible in the number of genes and operations, and in no way limited (other than by the machine architecture which was essentially 32-bit at the time, a simple recompile would make it 64 bit immediately) in how complex those operations could be. I could copy that code and hand it to you in seconds, even more efficiently than writing a new framework. I'll grant you that such code isn't common and may, by virtue of being a bit exotic, seem difficult, but it isn't.
The problem isn't code. The problem is that the problem space which contains all the wrong answers and the right answer or answers is very large, and finding the needle (or needles) in the haystack is tough, and then we need enough power or intuition to know that we actually have found it. That's very formidable, and it, I believe, entirely accounts for why we're not there yet. Many problems have looked like this from the unsolved side. Nuclear weapons. Walking and stair climbing. Chess. Speech recognition. And so on. All these problems have fallen; it is my impression that AI will fall too, and when it does, we'll all collectively go... "Oh. Is that all?"
What if I turn to you and confront you with: I don't care in the least if it is verifiable? The fact is, it is what is is (or it will be what it will be) and opinion or judgment won't change that in the least in either direction. Having said that, I rather suspect that there will be no significant doubt remaining when larger systems outperform every life form around them by many orders of magnitude. For instance, it was pretty obvious that Einstein was intelligent. Faced with something many, many orders of magnitude more powerful a thinker than Einstein, cries for verification will go quietly into the night like the philosophical, self-centered misdirection they are. The questions that matter are functional, not philosophical. And those are relatively easy questions.
Copying the structure of the brain in all particulars would produce a brain and so we would still have failed at producing AI. At best we could claim is to have copied natural intelligence artificially.
I would say you're pointing to a distinction without a difference. The objective I put forth is a technical one, and what it is, is to obtain an intelligence in a technical form whereby it is essentially immortal, can be repaired, accelerated, enhanced, extended, and copied, all by relatively trivial means. As far as the prideful "we did it" thing goes, I really couldn't care less. I'm interested in the technological and social benefits that will accrue, and also interested in the resulting beings.
...we still haven't identified any mechanism complex enough to account for the process of memory. If that turns out to be a quantum function it might very well be nonreproducible, at least in a familiar form.
Why? There's nothing about quantum physics that is difficult (in the sense of requiring non-standard code or hardware to do it) to simulate or emulate.
You (and most proponents of AI) have failed to answer any of the philosophical/metaphysical questions
I have yet to encounter a valid question of this type. They have all started from assumptions not in evidence. If you'd care to specify an actual question, I'd be happy to have a go.
I suspect there are cellular-level mysteries yet to be discovered, including possibly quantum action at a low level
Perhaps so. But there's nothing about quantum physics that can't be simulated, so this is not in principle a threat to the assertion that the mechanism can be simulated or emulated.
t is a rather simple-minded and arrogant "faith" that leads you to believe we have anywhere near a good understanding of how the brain works.
Is it? I only stated that there is no indication at this point that we won't be able to understand the hardware; I have explicitly said that the state of the hardware is something else (and that we don't need to understand it anyway.) It seems to me that the claim that we *won't* be able to understand the hardware is the one with the least basis in fact; progress is made every day in understanding how cells of all kinds operate, and no one has run into any magic philosophical or metaphysical barriers yet. That's a pretty good track record to use as a basis to predict that it is entirely likely that we're simply not going to.
If you don't know how the biological counterpart works then there is little hope for you to replicate it in logical abstractions/hardware.
Not so. From programmers who implement rotation as a table-driven set of values plotted from a graph instead of using sin and cos, to people who multiply by using repeated additions, to people who use Newton's laws instead of Einstein's, examples abound of things getting done despite the doers not having much of a clue as how to do it "right", or using methods that aren't strictly correct, but mostly work. We don't know how the human brain plays chess, but we can program it using all manner of approaches, some of which beat the human brain at the task. This is true for many things; the bottom line is that we're talking about creating a basic building block that can be combined into an intelligence. We *know* this approach works, because we have many examples with many degrees of varied functionality. The task (one way, anyway) is to (a) create the building blocks in such a manner that they can be combined in a similar way, and (b) combine them in (c) sufficient numbers.
Which (I believe) introduces problems from Godel..etc in the brain's case
As I have said previously here, it is important to draw a distinction between the algorithm, and the state of the algorithm (or many instances of it.) A modern computer with static memory is easy to understand, clocks halted, no running programs. In operation, you haven't got a chance. By the time you've even started on understanding one state it was in, it'll have been in many billions of other states and you are hopelessly behind. The same applies to the brain. Understanding a neuron (or a simulation of one, or a simulation of a functional block that does vaguely neuron-like things) is one thing; understanding the state of billions of them at once... that's not within human capacity, and seems rather pointless in any case. Get the neuron task handled; combine them; observe what arises. From there, the way lies open.
Evolutionary software is one, yes; but evolutionary software can run much faster than real world evolution. Especially if the researchers are working in a fast language instead of some of the slow abstracts that are more popular lately. This is possible if the algorithm is not overly complex. There is every incentive to write something like this in straight to the metal assembler, for instance. Also, as is typical with evolutionary approaches, more than one solution is possible, even if there is only one "optimal" solution.
Given that such an algorithm exists, every path that gets close, but is wrong in a different way, is one or more inspirations, mistakes, or collaborations away from the solution, each in a different way. The more complex the algorithm, the more ways one can get to it and the more ways it can be represented.
but humans are the only creature that has ever been scientifically shown to have anything like language.
That is incorrect. Language is the ability to communicate feelings, goals, results. It is not "speech." Some birds do indeed have the capability of speech, that is, they can make the same sounds we can, closely enough as to make no difference. Apes, however, have demonstrated actual communications using symbols, and even dogs have recently been found to have a consistent, though very small, vocabulary. Elephants and other animals have demonstrated the ability to think in the abstract (the "recognize one's self in the mirror and operate on the information thus provided experiments.) Lemurs use calls to communicate safety and status. Don't confuse the lack of vocal apparatus with an inability to communicate. They're not the same thing at all.
As for the rest, I think you've got it, essentially, but we disagree on scales. We'll see.
Sure if you build in enough memory and processing power the bottle neck ends up being the designers
No -- we definitely don't know this; you're simply making an unwarranted assumption. Until the actual algorithm is known, we have no idea how much memory and processing power will be required. Remember: Time is not the problem; it never was. The claim that processing power is a limiting factor is entirely specious. An intelligent answer achieved in a hundred days instead of a second is no less intelligent for being eight million times slower to arrive.
doing so would require things which we haven't even dreamed up yet, teaching a computer AI to be capable of meaningful creativity isn't something which is yet even on the most distant horizon
Doing *what*??? Honestly, you could have knocked me over with a feather when I read that. Do you teach a child to be capable of "meaningful creativity"? Of course not; it is a direct and natural consequence of intelligence. You won't have to teach an AI any such thing. It'll almost certainly arise all by itself, just as it does with us, and for the same reasons. I'd say it is completely fair to say that if it doesn't, the thing isn't intelligent in the first place.
...none of the programming languages or tool kits that are available presently offer that sort of capability in anything which resembles a reasonable number of lines of code.
No. Look: We *don't know* what the algorithm(s) is or are; so we *don't know* what the requirements are. You can't proclaim our tools insufficient to the task until you know what the task *is*. Add to that the fact that our experience thus far is that even the most complex systems can be 100% emulated - more slowly, but no less effectively in terms of achieving exactly correct function - by the most simple systems just a few bits wide, and the floor falls completely out from underneath your assertion.
...things which require for a deliberate violation of typical common sense, I'm skeptical that a machine could be taught to do so.
Well, again, are we taught to do so? Or do we learn that some situations call for such a response? I don't recall being taught any such thing, personally. If the thing is intelligent, it'll develop this, or something better (and I strongly suspect that common sense is overrated as a final metric of worth in the first place, so I don't see that as even slightly unlikely.)
I'm somewhat skeptical when you say that nothing a person's brain can do which cannot be modeled by software
I'm talking about hardware function - neurons, connectivity, signals. My position is that what the brain does, or what *a* brain does, is built upon the hardware capability it has. My assertion is that we can (following one path) build that capability. Once it is there, and functioning, we're not talking about models anymore. We're talking about it functioning like you because it *is* like you. That won't require any action on our part, or at least, nothing more than a less strenuous analog of parenting.
If by "working model" you mean a set of ultimate specifications, I'm not sure we need them at all. We may, but then again, perhaps not. Lots of tasks get solved in small steps and the power and value of the sum of the solutions is considerably more than one would anticipate. If by "working model" you mean the first actual AI, in the simulated flesh, neuro-science and psychology are probably entirely irrelevant. After all, nature didn't need them to come up with us. And we have some very powerful tools to make up for our relative impatience as compared to the timescales that process operates upon.
Slashdot Mirror
But this is a constitutional republic, and as such, the federal government is authorized by the constitution to use overbearing enforcement means to go just so far, and no further. The fact that they have gone much further than they have been authorized to go is not a matter for the population to vote on, it is outright malfeasance by the feds at large, explicit oath-breaking on the part of officeholders like the president of the United States, and conspiracy on the part of congress. At this point in time, we are not faced with voting decisions; we are faced with outright criminal activity by the federal government.
It is not "perspective" that the commerce clause has been inverted. It explicitly tells the feds they may regulate commerce between the states. The feds are using a sophist, absurd argument they derive from reasoning about the commerce clause we wouldn't accept from a three-year old to justify regulating commerce within the states. It is not "perspective" that the citizen's rights to keep and bear arms have been infringed; the feds infringe those rights far and wide, and somewhat ironically, they use arms on us to do it. It is not "perspective" that the feds are censoring our speech; the FCC, an arm of the federal government, flails about with a heavy hand when speech wanders into areas where it doesn't want it to go, citizens are ejected and barred from political gatherings, "free speech zones" are used to constrain the dissemination of dissenting opinion. It is not "perspective" that the feds are subjecting citizens to arrest without hearing, search and seizure without probable cause, oath or affirmation or warrant, ex post facto laws and punishments, theft of land for commercial interests. It is not "perspective" that 1 in 100 citizens are incarcerated, nor is it "perspective" that a huge number of them are suffering this fate for engaging in personal acts, or consensual acts between adults. It is not "perspective" that congress is making law on a regular basis that is not in the citizen's best interests; it is not "perspective" that the president is issuing "signing statements" that says he is not subject to the laws that congress makes.
These things are facts. They're not "perspective" or perception gleaned from "partisan sites." They are just some of the signs that the federal government now comprises the "bad big brother" that we have been warned many times, by many people, that it might one day become. Consequently, your argument that the grandparent poster's "negative perspective has overwhelmed reality and distorted it" is baseless and contradicts actual reality.
Many years ago, my father told me that a good reason not to use expletives in casual speech is that you won't have anything effectively shocking left to use as emphasis if and when the need arises. I was 16 at the time, and though I should have listened just because he was a writer by trade (and a Hugo-winning one at that), I found that his point made sense in and of itself. I took it to heart without having to look for additional justification.
In the last decade or so (I'm 50-ish), I find the urge to use expletives arises less and less (and consequently their impact with people who know me is rising), but this in no way implies that I fork over the right to the government to tell me what I can say, and who, or to people of what age, I can say it to, regardless of venue. As far as I am concerned, the FCC is engaged in unconstitutional and therefore unauthorized (and impossible to authorize without a constitutional amendment) behavior. Which does tend to cause the urge to spew a few expletives to arise.
This applies to religion as well.
The slashblurb that references the article says "Astrology... is a flawed mental shortcut for understanding the world... so is disregarding someone because of their spiritual beliefs" and then, in a glorious fit of politically correct snake-eats-tail, it says "smart people can convince themselves of silly things."
Political correctness, that social disease where people are encouraged to ignore the dragon* in the room for the sake of harmony and at the expense of everything else no matter how critical, is the operating mechanism here. Honestly religious people are gullible at best, and simply bewildered at worst. They're in precisely the same boat as the astrologically inclined, the homeopaths, and a long and depressing list of others.
When it comes to who one should date, I suspect that comes down to what one can tolerate, and that in turn is likely to be related to the length of the relationship. I could spend an evening with someone who thought almost anything. Sometimes you end up doing so as part of a larger group rather than by any kind of informed choice. Likewise, you can't always know what someone thinks about such issues without talking to them for a while unless your social style is more similar to interrogation than conversation (and in which case, you probably don't get to date very often.) Some people may be easily talked out of delusions; they may have simply been victims of the school systems and their peers. It seems to me that for these reasons, dating isn't a very practical place to draw a line in the sand.
For my life partner, however, I very carefully chose a declared and demonstrated strong atheist and skeptic; she took considerable effort to find, but it was absolutely worth the candle. For me, in such a relationship, beliefs like astrology, religion and so forth would be like acid eating away at the foundations. I have a strong conviction that looking at the world in as similar a way as possible brings the ever-elusive goal of perfect harmony a good deal closer. That, and a healthy mutual dose of lust. :)
* Not an elephant -- elephants are real
Sorry, no. There are a number of systems right here on earth that can't be accurately described or modeled with the Newtonian approach. GPS is a significant example that a very large number of people use and depend upon; Almost anything to do with photons or electron flow serves as well, from transistors to lasers and so on. Newton's models -- not "laws" -- are flawed, just as is any model that fails to account for actual reality, and only accounts for a simplified or limited version. Relativity is flawed as well; ask anyone doing work with issues at the quantum level (or simply read Einstein's remarks on the subject.) Quantum mechanics too, the other way around. There is no set of "laws" as yet, there are just some approximations that work at various scales when one can honestly say that the failures of these models aren't significant.
More to the point, how many have not, and how many people have been harmed by this?
How long has it been since the meaning of the commerce clause was inverted? How long since they began passing ex post facto laws? How long since the right to keep and carry arms has been infringed? How long have they been carrying on a war against people's personal, consensual choices? When we start talking about periods of fifty years, you've lost me on that whole "it takes time to work." Unacceptable.
My feeling is that if the system can't correct itself over a matter of decades, then the potential for harm by rogue laws (and rogue lawmakers, and rogue enforcers) is far too great. From this, I conclude that the system itself is thoroughly broken. It is not acceptable for people to be harmed by congress, the executive, and the courts exerting powers they have no authority to exert.
Also - in a system where the government is allowed to hide who is harmed by their various out of bounds, unauthorized infliction of rogue legislation, it is not acceptable to have to demonstrate harm to one's self. If that is to be the standard, then the law in question MUST be completely transparent in its application. This whole "You can't challenge phone / wire / network taps because you can't show you've been tapped because the government won't say" is a complete and utter line of nonsense.
The US legal system is being managed by criminals. Who says so? The constitution says so.
All of that is true, but given that, it is *still* more efficient to load from least accessible to most accessible. Dithering and foolishness causes more harm at the front of the plane with the back empty than it does at the back with nearer rows loading without having to pass the ditherer; loading back to front increases the likelihood of such activity occurring near the target seat. it really is obvious. But it isn't financially, socially or politically correct, so it isn't going to happen.
I mean, come on. Loading any empty container from the least accessible to the most accessible area when empty isn't trivially obvious? Did these people fail the square-blocks in round-hole test when they were kids?
Planes aren't loaded funny because the airlines are clueless; planes are loaded funny because the airlines are in the business of creating artificial social classing so that they can generate privileges, and then charge for them. Treat yourself and fly first class one time; you'll see what I mean. There's no other reason for first class to exist, in the sense of getting from here to there. Though I will say that first class in 1970 was a lot more "first" than it is today, what with other social changes that have transpired.
Likewise, old folk, pregnant women, children and invalids aren't loaded first because it is more efficient, they are loaded first because of social pressures (and accompanying income hits) that would arise if they were not given special treatment.
I agree completely. It is comparatively very inexpensive to do, and if you don't do it, you're saying something very bad to the worker.
What happens then is they have trouble getting great talent. That's almost always what happens. Because great talent has a strong negative correlation with the ability to endure 4, 6 or even 8 years of boredom.
<HUMOR><HANDWAVING>
...and then you typically end up with exactly the kind of application we associate with the government. It costs way too much, is delivered way too slow, doesn't do what the spec said it was supposed to in the first place, is completely incompatible with everything else ever written by the hand of man or woman, and in the end, gives up your data to someone who walks in a backdoor or even a front door left open by default entry criteria. When the final version is released, the rocket misses mars because module A was metric, and module B was imperial. None of which will matter when the whole thing is stamped classified, though for years, there will be a very small group of people with funny patches on their jackets who exchange knowing looks and snickers when they see each other.
Q: "Why couldn't the program induce lasing in the tuned cavity?"
A: "The whole thing was based on black ops..."
</HANDWAVING></HUMOR>
The real riddle there is why, when they pictures of all the replicants to show Our Hero, was mr interviewer bladerunner guy ignorant of the standard labor model he was talking to until he saw the pupils dilate in a specifically non-human manner? Never could work that out.
The first thing to do is remove arbitrary barriers. IE, "must" have X years of experience, X degree, held X previous positions, must move to our area. That's the sum of major mistakes most operations make. The best programmers in the world don't typically get that way by being just another college / job drone (though some do... just don't slam the door based on mundane requirements - you want the problem solved, not a title you can be proud of.)
Secondly, market the job — make sure people can find out about it. That's perhaps obvious, but I know a lot of companies that try to stick to the back alleys of old boy's clubs, and it's no wonder they can't find anyone. Put an ad, a BIG one, somewhere programmers go a lot. Like slashdot. :-)
Third, salary, salary, salary, and benefits (particularly insurance and family coverage). Move 'em if you have to. We've even bought houses outright for our programming team members. You can't expect to hire a superstar by treating them like a drone.
The problem is almost always that really good programmers don't have to go looking, and if they do, they can - and will - turn their noses up at being treated like a commodity. Yet that's just what most companies do. Plus they throw up arbitrary and unrelated barriers to entry. Unfathomable, really.
[spits coffee]
Look here, genius, I don't need to read "man memlock" to know that linux will swap out part of my RUNNING APPLICATION in order to cache a stupid web page it could just as easily fetch from the HD (which probably has it cached in RAM also); NOR, as a user, should I be expected to manage such behavior, NOR do I have the time or energy to go in and recompile applications like the Gimp so that they'll operate at a reasonable speed instead of letting the OS take RAM from them. What I NEED, as a USER, is an OS that respects the tasks I am trying to get done and doesn't let the filesystem consume RAM for trivia such as filesystem caching like a crack fiend sucking down their first toke in weeks.
With regard to the Mac, I'm sitting here with 4 gigs of ram right at this moment, with 2.4 gigs FREE, and OS X's activity monitor shows 800+MB of swap in use(!!!), as well as a record of considerable paging going on. You don't need to read the memory allocation docs (NOR should you have to!) to know, as a USER, that this behavior is pathological.
When I say that the OS's aren't handling memory and swap well, I'm not talking about how to write an application to try to manage the OS's shortcomings (which, btw, I've been doing for decades now), I'm talking about actual performance of the OS running real user apps in real world conditions. And none of the big three do a great job when the pressure is on. That's not hand waving; that's a *fact*.
Yes, that's what we're all hoping. Software patents were a terrible, stupid idea. The hope is that the court will overturn the ruling that allowed them, and that patent lawyers can go back to just buggering up the hardware side of things.
No, I *don't* want "human intelligence, not just intelligence." I just want intelligence. I don't even know why some people are so hung up on the idea of "human" intelligence in the first place. Humans have very mixed records (cough) Bush (cough.)
As for the rest, those are your opinions and you are welcome to them, but I don't share them -- any of them. I don't view AI as "stuck", I don't think human grey matter is the limiting definition of where the method of science can come from (it is, after all, a very simple method), and I know for a *fact* that solutions can arise where understanding is less than complete; been there, done that, wore the surprised look.
But I'll share that pizza with you on The Day, however we get there, and whomever does it, using whatever approach. :)
Er, yes. :-) All the verbing of a noun is, in essence, is emphasis. Ball. Fast ball. Dogs and cats do this all the time. Want food! Food is not forthcoming. REALLY want food!
What you're really talking about is the level of abstraction; and that's not something they're going to communicate if they're not doing it in the first place.
Yes, you can. You can do it several ways. You can have it learn how by providing error feedback and various inputs and controls. You can do it by approximating various parts of the problem and solving the entire task in pieces, without ever understanding everything that is going on (and in fact, we have to do that, because we don't understand the underlying computer's low-level states when we write our high level code.) And lastly, there are many ways to catch that ball; using a net, using a "hand", using a "glove", using a vacuum, using a horn, etc. Neither the argument nor the analogy holds up.
No, they're very easy. I can write you a relatively high speed genetic framework in C in an afternoon; I've already done it and released the result as a commercial product. It ran many thousands of generations per second on 4 MHz 68000 hardware and was indefinitely and trivially extensible in the number of genes and operations, and in no way limited (other than by the machine architecture which was essentially 32-bit at the time, a simple recompile would make it 64 bit immediately) in how complex those operations could be. I could copy that code and hand it to you in seconds, even more efficiently than writing a new framework. I'll grant you that such code isn't common and may, by virtue of being a bit exotic, seem difficult, but it isn't.
The problem isn't code. The problem is that the problem space which contains all the wrong answers and the right answer or answers is very large, and finding the needle (or needles) in the haystack is tough, and then we need enough power or intuition to know that we actually have found it. That's very formidable, and it, I believe, entirely accounts for why we're not there yet. Many problems have looked like this from the unsolved side. Nuclear weapons. Walking and stair climbing. Chess. Speech recognition. And so on. All these problems have fallen; it is my impression that AI will fall too, and when it does, we'll all collectively go... "Oh. Is that all?"
What if I turn to you and confront you with: I don't care in the least if it is verifiable? The fact is, it is what is is (or it will be what it will be) and opinion or judgment won't change that in the least in either direction. Having said that, I rather suspect that there will be no significant doubt remaining when larger systems outperform every life form around them by many orders of magnitude. For instance, it was pretty obvious that Einstein was intelligent. Faced with something many, many orders of magnitude more powerful a thinker than Einstein, cries for verification will go quietly into the night like the philosophical, self-centered misdirection they are. The questions that matter are functional, not philosophical. And those are relatively easy questions.
I would say you're pointing to a distinction without a difference. The objective I put forth is a technical one, and what it is, is to obtain an intelligence in a technical form whereby it is essentially immortal, can be repaired, accelerated, enhanced, extended, and copied, all by relatively trivial means. As far as the prideful "we did it" thing goes, I really couldn't care less. I'm interested in the technological and social benefits that will accrue, and also interested in the resulting beings.
Why? There's nothing about quantum physics that is difficult (in the sense of requiring non-standard code or hardware to do it) to simulate or emulate.
I have yet to encounter a valid question of this type. They have all started from assumptions not in evidence. If you'd care to specify an actual question, I'd be happy to have a go.
Perhaps so. But there's nothing about quantum physics that can't be simulated, so this is not in principle a threat to the assertion that the mechanism can be simulated or emulated.
Is it? I only stated that there is no indication at this point that we won't be able to understand the hardware; I have explicitly said that the state of the hardware is something else (and that we don't need to understand it anyway.) It seems to me that the claim that we *won't* be able to understand the hardware is the one with the least basis in fact; progress is made every day in understanding how cells of all kinds operate, and no one has run into any magic philosophical or metaphysical barriers yet. That's a pretty good track record to use as a basis to predict that it is entirely likely that we're simply not going to.
If you don't know how the biological counterpart works then there is little hope for you to replicate it in logical abstractions/hardware.
Not so. From programmers who implement rotation as a table-driven set of values plotted from a graph instead of using sin and cos, to people who multiply by using repeated additions, to people who use Newton's laws instead of Einstein's, examples abound of things getting done despite the doers not having much of a clue as how to do it "right", or using methods that aren't strictly correct, but mostly work. We don't know how the human brain plays chess, but we can program it using all manner of approaches, some of which beat the human brain at the task. This is true for many things; the bottom line is that we're talking about creating a basic building block that can be combined into an intelligence. We *know* this approach works, because we have many examples with many degrees of varied functionality. The task (one way, anyway) is to (a) create the building blocks in such a manner that they can be combined in a similar way, and (b) combine them in (c) sufficient numbers.
As I have said previously here, it is important to draw a distinction between the algorithm, and the state of the algorithm (or many instances of it.) A modern computer with static memory is easy to understand, clocks halted, no running programs. In operation, you haven't got a chance. By the time you've even started on understanding one state it was in, it'll have been in many billions of other states and you are hopelessly behind. The same applies to the brain. Understanding a neuron (or a simulation of one, or a simulation of a functional block that does vaguely neuron-like things) is one thing; understanding the state of billions of them at once... that's not within human capacity, and seems rather pointless in any case. Get the neuron task handled; combine them; observe what arises. From there, the way lies open.
Evolutionary software is one, yes; but evolutionary software can run much faster than real world evolution. Especially if the researchers are working in a fast language instead of some of the slow abstracts that are more popular lately. This is possible if the algorithm is not overly complex. There is every incentive to write something like this in straight to the metal assembler, for instance. Also, as is typical with evolutionary approaches, more than one solution is possible, even if there is only one "optimal" solution.
Given that such an algorithm exists, every path that gets close, but is wrong in a different way, is one or more inspirations, mistakes, or collaborations away from the solution, each in a different way. The more complex the algorithm, the more ways one can get to it and the more ways it can be represented.
That is incorrect. Language is the ability to communicate feelings, goals, results. It is not "speech." Some birds do indeed have the capability of speech, that is, they can make the same sounds we can, closely enough as to make no difference. Apes, however, have demonstrated actual communications using symbols, and even dogs have recently been found to have a consistent, though very small, vocabulary. Elephants and other animals have demonstrated the ability to think in the abstract (the "recognize one's self in the mirror and operate on the information thus provided experiments.) Lemurs use calls to communicate safety and status. Don't confuse the lack of vocal apparatus with an inability to communicate. They're not the same thing at all.
As for the rest, I think you've got it, essentially, but we disagree on scales. We'll see.
Authoritative cite, please. Otherwise, no, it hasn't.
No -- we definitely don't know this; you're simply making an unwarranted assumption. Until the actual algorithm is known, we have no idea how much memory and processing power will be required. Remember: Time is not the problem; it never was. The claim that processing power is a limiting factor is entirely specious. An intelligent answer achieved in a hundred days instead of a second is no less intelligent for being eight million times slower to arrive.
Doing *what*??? Honestly, you could have knocked me over with a feather when I read that. Do you teach a child to be capable of "meaningful creativity"? Of course not; it is a direct and natural consequence of intelligence. You won't have to teach an AI any such thing. It'll almost certainly arise all by itself, just as it does with us, and for the same reasons. I'd say it is completely fair to say that if it doesn't, the thing isn't intelligent in the first place.
No. Look: We *don't know* what the algorithm(s) is or are; so we *don't know* what the requirements are. You can't proclaim our tools insufficient to the task until you know what the task *is*. Add to that the fact that our experience thus far is that even the most complex systems can be 100% emulated - more slowly, but no less effectively in terms of achieving exactly correct function - by the most simple systems just a few bits wide, and the floor falls completely out from underneath your assertion.
Well, again, are we taught to do so? Or do we learn that some situations call for such a response? I don't recall being taught any such thing, personally. If the thing is intelligent, it'll develop this, or something better (and I strongly suspect that common sense is overrated as a final metric of worth in the first place, so I don't see that as even slightly unlikely.)
I'm talking about hardware function - neurons, connectivity, signals. My position is that what the brain does, or what *a* brain does, is built upon the hardware capability it has. My assertion is that we can (following one path) build that capability. Once it is there, and functioning, we're not talking about models anymore. We're talking about it functioning like you because it *is* like you. That won't require any action on our part, or at least, nothing more than a less strenuous analog of parenting.
If by "working model" you mean a set of ultimate specifications, I'm not sure we need them at all. We may, but then again, perhaps not. Lots of tasks get solved in small steps and the power and value of the sum of the solutions is considerably more than one would anticipate. If by "working model" you mean the first actual AI, in the simulated flesh, neuro-science and psychology are probably entirely irrelevant. After all, nature didn't need them to come up with us. And we have some very powerful tools to make up for our relative impatience as compared to the timescales that process operates upon.