That's probably because we have discovered little about the brain's structure and function.
No, it is *probably not*. It *may* be, but since *nothing else* has presented us with that kind of problem, the odds of the brain doing so are pretty darned slim. You are postulating a heretofore never-achieved discovery in the course of determining how a mundane (by every indication) biological system, constrained as far as we know by the same physics and chemistry everything else is, operates. Considering the *fact* that there is no indication for such a discovery, I'd say you are way out on a creaky limb and you should be asking yourself how you got there.
Complete search is a dead duck and incomplete search is not very reliable.
...in humans, specifically. So in the goal of creating a human-like intelligence, we're already there.
Finally, there is precious little funding out there for this kind of research, which is a shame, but there you go.
There are 24 hours in a day, normal jobs take 8 or so, we sleep for 8 or so, weekends offer 32 more hours, that adds up to a *lot* of time for pursuing the tasks at hand without requiring any funding at all, presuming you are motivated and own a decent computer (I just bought an 8-core machine for under three grand, I wouldn't call that a "funding problem" for anyone with even a lightweight drive towards working on these problems.) This is -- I think -- an algorithm problem, not a hardware problem, which means that what you need is a language you can write in (free) and create powerful output (free) and you also might need to collaborate with others, which is also available for no more than the cost of a network connection and some additional free software. A terabyte of long term storage (HD) is about $200 right now, and getting less expensive all the time. Ergo, no funding problem. Unless I'm wrong, and hardware that cannot be simulated is required, which I *really*, *really*, *really* doubt, as nature has never presented us with such a case as yet. But I'll allow it as a possibility, because we're not there yet (though I'm willing to bet money against it...:-)
However, to program a computer to simulate thought accurately, an accurate algorithm for thought (or the biological underpinnings of neural activity) IS implicitly required, as algorithms are the way the computer works.
No, you have missed my point. An algorithm or algorithms is certainly required, and I never meant to imply otherwise. Human understanding of said algorithm(s), however, is explicitly not required. And there are many paths that lead to such a situation. Whether one of those will take us to a form of AI remains to be seen, which is what I was saying.
I think it is impossible for any one brain to fathom how a brain works completely
It is one thing to understand the mechanism required for operation -- it is quite another to understand the state it is in. I think you are confusing the latter with the former; the former is relatively trivial, and the latter is not required any more than a complete understanding of the state of everything involved at NASA is required in order to create, launch and recover the space shuttle. Complex systems are holistic, mostly co-operative combinations of subsystems, and as long as someone, somewhere, understands (or understood at one time, or possessed an adequate analogy to, or approximation of) the subsystems, or even the subsystems that make up the subsystems, that's sufficient to develop a fully functional macro system. And -- most importantly -- it only has to be done once, because of the unusual copyable nature of the result.
My current software does what I said, but it's too slow on current hardware.
That's a *huge* claim; if it is true, you have AI now. Because -- as I explained in a previous post in this thread -- speed is absolutely irrelevant. If you can demonstrate your claim that your software operates now, no matter *how* slowly it operates, you are at the end of your funding issues, not to mention any other issues you may face in life. Which -- to be frank -- is why I doubt your claim. At the point you explicitly claim to be at, I'd already own a mega-yacht and be pulling up next to a lot of potential love.
But good luck, and I really mean that. I'd much rather be wrong and see you bring this right to the table, even if you have completely blown the financial potentials of the development process.
But sadly, we still know jack shit about how the brain works
Most of us know jack about the algorithms that allow us to catch a baseball in flight, yet we can still do it. Furthermore, a person from 10000 BC with no math at all by today's standards could do it just as well as we can. Implementing solutions does not always require a complete understanding of what you've done. You can even be wrong and it'll still work for other reasons. So hard-pegging this to what we "know" could be a severe error.
And no, simply copying the brain structure will not the answer.
That's a very bold statement, especially since (a) that's the way nature does it for all its intelligences, high and low, so we know the process works in the general case, and (b) as you say, we don't know many things yet, so claiming that we "know" what won't work seems to be disingenuous or at the very least not well thought out.
I think it is important not to conflate the fact that we don't understand something with the idea that it will be difficult once figured out or discovered as a consequence of some fortuitous sequence of events. That's been shown again and again not to be the case. It *may* be so, but it is by no means certain to be so, and for that matter, it isn't indicated by the complexity of the brain's hardware. The brain is considerably more formidable as a mass of immensely complex moderated connectivity than it is as a collection of cellular-level mystery machines, and a good deal of the complexity at the cellular level is almost certainly irrelevant to the task of thought -- keeping the cell alive is probably in no way related to non-pathological mental operation, yet there's a lot of hardware and systems involved in the task.
Wasn't there a simulation of a mouse's brain, or a few cells of it, for a few seconds with the help of a modern supercomputer, we can barley manage to do that.
Well, let's look at the rate of general progress in computing. In 1971, we were putting 2300 transistors on a chip. They ran at a few hundred KHz. In a fairly smooth progression, we've gotten to 3 GHz, where we're likely to stay, and today, we're at about two billion transistors on a chip, with no end in sight as to how far that can go. This is not Moore's law; Moore's law is about how many fit into a particular space; this is about how many can be integrated into a functional unit. That's 36 years. Thirty six years from now, that ability to "simulate a few cells" should grow just in the *normal* scheme of things into an ability to simulate a billion or so cells without any trouble. But there's more to this. Not everything in a cell needs to be simulated; for instance, metabolic processes such as waste generation and removal don't, nor do breakdown, aging, impacts by free radicals, all of that. Part of what needs to be done between here and the goal is streamline the simulation so that it is operating in the zone of mentation and not biological imperatives. I suspect, and yes indeed this is just my opinion, that the simulation will be much easier when we understand just what it is we need to simulate.
This all leaves out the issue of non-simulating intelligence, where the thinking is not patterned after human mechanisms; this could arise from evolutionary software or something along those lines. And of course, one of the reasons that all this is kind of a holy grail anyway, only the first intelligence is difficult; the second... Nth is just a matter of copying a machine state.
As for language, that's solved in the I/o sense -- synthesis and "listening" are both satisfactorily complete. Intelligent discussion can only be expected from an intelligent machine, so that's only as far away as machine intelligence is.
Even if an intelligent computer was somehow created it would be an enormous accomplishment to have it be as intelligent as a bug or a small animal.
Small animals, I'm of the opinion, are a lot more intelligent than most people give them credit for. They just have a different intelligence. I am sure that we will go through the small animal level on the way to our level, and beyond; the thing is, if you can do the one, you can do the other. There's no indication of a significant difference in the wetware, there's just more of it and it is arranged somewhat differently. No reason to expect anything different from hardware designed to do the same job.
Emotions and language seem very far off, I'd say such a thing is centuries away.
Why? Small animals do both. Those aren't even the hard things. The hard things are introspection and self-awareness. Those are the ones we have not even a theory for, today. In any case, your ideas are certainly in with a lot of good company; but not me. I think we're only one discovery - algorithmic in nature - from AI. Self-awareness may turn out to be a property that self-organizes and arises without any special prodding from us; that would be marvelous, not to mention fortuitous, but hardly impossible - again, that's how nature did it.
Here's why I think we're just an algorithm away. If you left a question that absolutely required intelligence on a counter, and went back to pick it up the next day, and the answer was there -- you would agree that an intelligence had answered the question. If a human could answer it in one second, or an AI could answer it in 23 hours, it's still just as intelligent an answer when you pick it up. The point is that speed really isn't the issue. The issue is the process, that is, the algorithm. So it turns out that in terms of speed, number of transistors, etc, that's really not the limiting factor for developing intelligen
Speaking as an engineer and a (~40-year) programmer:
Odds are extremely good for beyond human AI, given no restrictions on initial and early form factor. I say this because thus far, we've discovered nothing whatsoever that is non-reproducible about the brain's structure and function, all that has to happen here is for that trend to continue; and given that nowhere in nature, at any scale remotely similar to the range that includes particles, cells and animals, have we discovered anything that appears to follow an unknowable set of rules, the odds of finding anything like that in the brain, that is, something we can't simulate or emulate with 100% functional veracity, are just about zero.
Odds are downright terrible for "intelligent nanobots", we might have hardware that can do what a cell can do, that is, hunt for (possibly a series of) chemical cues and latch on to them, then deliver the payload -- perhaps repeatedly in the case of disease-fighting designs -- but putting intelligence into something on the nanoscale is a challenge of an entirely different sort that we have not even begun to move down the road on; if this is to be accomplished, the intelligence won't be "in" the nano bot, it'll be a telepresence for an external unit (and we're nowhere down *that* road, either -- nanoscale sensors and transceivers are the target, we're more at the level of Look, Martha, a GEAR! A Pseudo-Flagellum!)
The problem with hand-waving -- even when you're Ray Kurzweil, whom I respect enormously -- is that one wave out of many can include a technology that never develops, and your whole creation comes crashing down.
When you say a ground up rewrite, I worry. This is because the real-time nature of the OS is something that none of the other "big 3" have gotten right; there isn't a one of them that won't glitch your audio or video just at the wrong time (not that there is a right time.) BeOS was unique in that it was designed to be real time from day one and -- and this is the kicker -- they got it right. For the first time in modern OS history. So the issue here is, given that this is a rewrite to (presumably) R5 interface spec, will the underpinnings be of a similar nature, or will we simply have a fourth OS that can't handle real-time demands reliably?
But I don't look forward to the long climb up the curve of identifying and cleaning up what, going by past experience, is likely to be quite a nest of security issues.
Having said that, if it is actually like BeOS in that it handles multimedia similarly (that is, *really* well and without even a nod towards DRM), I'd be very likely to put some effort into using it. Linux's swap paradigm is completely unsuited to applications that need to respond *right now*, OS X is just about the same (it's only been a matter of hours since I shook my fist at Leopard for swapping out things I was using), and Windows... ugh. Going completely the wrong way.
I suppose it'll be a while yet, though. [prepares to wait]
The reasons really don't matter on a per-service or per-good basis; what we can observe is that the trend of the value of a dollar is the wrong way, and we need it to go the other way or at least stop moving the wrong way. Given that some things - medical care, for instance - are increasing in cost for reasons we're too stupid to control (torts, insurance), it is all the more important that our money *at least* retains the same purchasing power. It'd be nice if it had more, but it'd be nice if robots did everything for us at no cost, too.
Yes, it is. And it is a problem that extends the length and breadth of government regulation, from the number of windows in your house to the FCC's mismanagement of the airwaves.
Nope. Gold was (and is, for that matter - visit Utah sometime) used for roofs because it didn't corrode; roofs made from from it last amazing lengths of time. So do wall coverings and tapestries. It was used for vessels and implements because it was extremely malleable and ductile, and because it could be alloyed with other metals and still retain its relatively easy to work characteristics. It was used for art both because it was easy to work and because the resulting objects would last indefinitely if they were simply kept with care. It always had value because it has many useful characteristics, and it isn't particularly common. Given that it had value, it came to symbolize value - hence crowns and scepters and the like - and with that value, it came to symbolize care and wealth, thus adding to its value as jewelry. Bling.
Weaker than... what? Vulnerable to... what? Do you think for even one second that if we take our bases out of Germany, Russia will attack us? If we take our bases out of Saudi, you think Iran will build a fleet of transports and invade? If we take our bases out of South Korea, you think North Korea will nuke us? What are you smoking?
Personally, I don't think you know what "weak" and "vulnerable" even mean. Weak means our currency is no longer a world benchmark, vulnerable means we have to borrow to keep our economy from tanking on a regular basis. We are not the world's mommy, and we should stop pretending we are. We can't afford it, and they sure as heck aren't paying us enough to perform the service. You want to keep a forward base in another country? Fine. We can do that. Let me know when they're ready to foot the bill, plus set-up costs up front, and take-down costs in escrow.
In the meantime, we need to be working on achieving a balance of self-reliance and equitable trade.
Do you seriously think economists are unaware of, let's say, privately owned companies?
I was handwaving, obviously there is more to it; but it doesn't matter in the least, because no matter *what* it is economists are doing, it isn't working and that is what matters. You can sing the praises of the complexity, sophistication and glory of economic theory and its practitioners until you're blue in the face, and not one word of it will make up for the simple fact that it takes more work today to heat a house, buy a house, educate your kid, and so on, than it did in 1965, and this has been a continuously wrong-ward trend. IOW, the economy is, and has been, moving very consistently in the wrong direction. So until whatever you have to say addresses that... you're just blowing smoke.
Taxes are paid in more dollars, which have arbitrary value, based on the fed's uncontrolled and unsupervised actions. It is a circular arrangement with an arbitrary amplifier / attenuator in the loop over which we have no control, and which appears to be operated by a spastic retard under the influence of hallucinatory drugs. The result of the system to date has been that it takes more labor to cover the same basic daily needs one used to be able to cover for less labor. That is the description of a broken system. No way around it. The goal cannot be to reduce the standard of living. That's insane. We need inherent stability in our currency, not some lunatic arbitrarily (or via some gaming system) making up what it means on a daily basis.
It's clear you don't understand how economic "truth" is decided: by very careful analysis of lots and lots of data, and using statistical evidence to reject hypotheses.
What is "clear" is that no matter how it is decided, it is not working well because the standard of living is dropping against the lower limits of income. You can go on all you like about the precise mechanisms used, all you're doing is enumerating and elaborating on what does not work. Because nothing you can say can show that it works. It doesn't work - real purchasing power for the fundamental necessities of life is dropping, with very few exceptions. The ability to buy a more affordable television doesn't make up for not being able to heat the house, or to take the kid to see the doctor. The fed has screwed the pooch. It is well past time to screw the fed.
That is ridiculous. What family living on a $5...$6 wage is going to be investing in gold? They're too involved in trying to find cheaper groceries and learning to live in coats with the thermostat set to 50f. You completely miss the entire focus of the issue at hand, which is the standard of living of the bottom level earners, not about me.
No, no, no. Look. Your argument is that because something is better, things are the same. The fact is, if you add value to something along with price until it is out of reach, it doesn't matter what you added. If a family can't come up with the $90 to see the physician, then it matters not at all to them that the physician would do a better job than the person they would have seen in 1965. If the car is safer, it doesn't matter to them if they can't afford to buy one. If the house is better constructed, it doesn't matter to them if they can't afford to buy it, or can't pay the payments and taxes on it.
These things are gradually being priced out of reach; it matters not one whit that the things themselves get shinier, sparkle more, or impress the neighbors in wholly new ways. What matters is can you afford a place to live, a place to raise your family, a competitive education, heating and cooling.
If you want to argue more features or higher quality, you have to keep the relative cost the same; because cost is an overriding factor that obviates the others. If you can't afford something, you're done, regardless of anything else you care to throw on the table. And don't try to offer borrowing, either, borrowing just makes things more expensive and moves the cost into the future, where it will be waiting to bite the naive buyer even harder. The idea of buying things on credit because you can't actually afford them now is inherently broken. It is just that the people who don't understand that (a very large number, sadly) are being victimized by the financial industry.
Does it? The last time I went to Europe (and mind you, I was traveling through fairly prosperous countries — England, France, Germany, Italy), I was appalled at the public squat toilets, the far too narrow streets, the high price of food and fuel and rent, the crushing taxation, the sublimated violence that turned into rage at sports matches, the oppressive anti-liberty political atmosphere (which has since mutated in some regions into an outright surveillance society, for example England), the binge drinking... I distinctly recall that most people didn't have air conditioning and that heat waves resulted in people dying in surprising numbers (well, not that surprising when you consider they basically got cooked because they had insufficient environmental controls for the living conditions they endured.) I remember being shown a tiny little stove that one young couple in London used as their entire heating system. Their kid was buried in a ball of flannel every hour of the day. It was bloody *cold* in that flat. I starkly remember being driven to nausea over the smell of the water in the canals in Venice and in the alleyways of London. When Europe's standard of living catches up to ours, then you can talk to me about how your economic policies are all that. Europe as a whole presents a very wide variety of living standards relative to lowest income, depending upon the country you're in and what issue you're looking at. The US is considerably more uniform, and frankly, my experience is that the US has been a far more prosperous place to live; not that it is anything like it could be, it isn't, but it is better than the countries I visited, certainly, on almost every level (we're still being really stupid about healthcare, though.) I think you'd make a considerably stronger point if you were talking about the most successful countries in Europe, and not Europe as a whole. The problem is that even if you can point to a successful fiat system, that doesn't make the next fiat system work, because the system itself isn't stable — it is the management of the system that makes it or breaks it, and our management system — the fed — is pathological from the starting line. What I advocate is a system that is stable in and of itself, and that is a system based upon commodities of real value. This resists opinion and knee-jerk responses from twisting up the finances of the day. In my opinion. This is *all* in my opinion, of course.
No, you can't. You'll be paid minimum wage, or you won't be working withing the system. You should read a little more carefully. Also, make sure you get all the way to the last paragraph; I directly addressed what happens when earnings are too low, which of course includes $0.
The fact is, without money -- a means to exchange for food -- you'll die. Therefore, if gold is money, gold has worth. You need to work on your ability to deal with abstracts.
Gold's value as art isn't because it is shiny, it is because it does not corrode. And there is no question that this is something that has appealed to people for a long time. However, that same characteristic gives it industrial value; that's why it is used for electrical connections, as well as its excellent ability to carry high levels of current (and heat.) Coatings of gold are used in fighter cockpits in order to control radar reflections without disturbing the pilots vision. Gold is used at extremely high purity as bonding wires to semiconductors -- there are quite a few of these in your computer, for instance. Gold is used in combination with other metals to obtain mixes of characteristics to which it contributes a great deal. So gold's value isn't all about bling; it has many significant uses in other areas.
No, that's not a problem at all. What that does is naturally adjusts the value of the the commodity, in this case, gold. Decreasing real prices (because of decreasing costs) against an unmoving commodity price is a good thing; it increases the standard of living. However, when the *actual* value of the commodity increases, and the amount of that commodity required to buy, say, a bushel of grain is now less, this has not changed the amount of value one has received for the current grain; what it does is increases the value of any of the commodity you have managed to save, though, and again in that way, it is of benefit to the citizens.
Let's say that on one Monday, X amount of gold, equal to one currency note, buys a cheeseburger. On a later Monday, gold has become scarcer or has found a new use that makes it more valuable, and now,.5X of gold buys a cheeseburger. Your wages were XY. Now, they are.5XY (because the notes are based on the relative value of gold.) Turns out that you still get a cheeseburger for one currency note. However, *if* you have gold, and not the note, you have enough for TWO cheeseburgers. Because you invested in the commodity (took a risk) as opposed to riding the community's trading scrip, which is there to provide a *stable* means of assigning value to everything else.
The problem with federal nothing-in-reserve notes is that they are inherently unstable. Instead of letting the economy expand and contract naturally with the amount of goods and services and labor available, the fed regularly reaches in and messes with how things are going based on how satisfied they are with the current situation (a state of mind which has NO direct link with goods, services or labor!) By doing so, they hugely modify how everything from investments to loans stand as assets and obligations at every level, but when they do so, the currency itself changes what it can do - IE, the price of a cheeseburger changes, even though there is no good, service or labor cost associated with cheeseburgers that has changed. This is management by fiat, and it is *not* a good thing.
But it is even worse than it appears. That is because, in order to lever the value of those notes, we end up borrowing actual value from other countries, with interest. That interest is a huge cost and that cost is paid by the taxpayers -- NOT by the fed. In order to pay that cost, the earnings (federal nothing in reserve notes) are taken away from citizens, leaving them with less ability to buy for the hours they worked. In other words, pushing them further downslope with regard to hours worked against goods and services that can be purchased. These aren't theories; these are the actual effects. And this is just the interest. Taxpayers will also have to pay back the principle, as well, eventually. Our kids or grandkids, etc. So what is happening isn't really an adjustment of current conditions; what it is, is a MOVE of conditions from now until time comes to pay the principle, with the additional load of having to pay the interest, which is considerable.
That you even ask the question is surprising to me. Minimum wage sets the floor at which jobs create an earner's ability to interact with the economy. Minimum wage also sets the base cost of anything that requires workers to create, be it product or service. From there, costs and wages go up as skills become scarcer. So minimum wage is a critical issue for both earners and job providers. Furthermore, minimum wage, by setting the earning level for the very lowest earning class of people who actually work within the system, places a hard line that cannot be crossed with regard to what such a worker can obtain within the system. You can't get below it, because you can't be paid less. An hour of labor gets you a minimum of $5.85, period. No less. About ten hours of work gets you one very short, very cursory doctor's appointment. An hour of work gets you about two gallons of gas. And so on. Earlier, you would have gotten more product or service, for less work on your part. This is a direct and concrete measure of economic conditions for the lowest class of earner, which is what I was talking about above.
What if there wasn't one
This is irrelevant; there *is* one and there has been for some time, so we can use it to measure available standards of living at the lowest participating tier at any point during the period which it has been enforced. You want to argue economic issues based on a situation that does not exist. I am simply pointing out the situation that actually *does* exist. My observation is that given the demonstrated effect on earning and buying power that our current economic system has had at the base level, we are going backwards. What one would hope for is that purchasing power would increase, not decrease. It has, however, decreased in real terms, and because of that, I think change is called for.
You're going to have to come up with some numbers involving actual wages paid to compare to your numbers on inflation.
Minimum wage *is* the actual wage paid for the lowest levels of people participating in the system. It has been since the 1930's or thereabouts. This gives you a direct lever, at the bottom, to relate an hour's work to the purchase of various goods and services. That's what I'm telling you: At the lowest economic level, it took less work to see the doctor in 1965 than it does today. That's going backwards. It took less work in 1965 to buy a house. That's going backwards. It took less hours of work in 1965 to buy a car. That's going backwards. It took less hours of work to buy a gallon of fuel. That's going backwards. It took less hours of work to put your kid through college or trade school. That's going backwards. It took less hours of work to buy heat for your home. That's going backwards. Life is getting more difficult for these people, not less difficult. That's going backwards. It is as plain as the nose on your face if you'll just stop and think about it for a minute.
There are areas in the economy where people get more for their hour of work (electronics is one such instance) but in general, and especially for the basic requirements of day to day life, the ratio of hours worked to products and services obtainable are all going the wrong way.
Proceeding in a course of action(s) that continues to make life more difficult for the lowest levels will eventually result in a situation where life within the systems is perceived as too difficult and people will turn to alternative means of making money; this is where black markets, under-the-counter wages, illegal products and services all gain a foothold in the economy. When working within the system fails to provide people with a tolerable lifestyle, they will look outside the system for relief. And furthermore, they will inevitably find such relief in a society that encourages out of bounds earnings mechanisms with laws that insist upon characterizing all manner of consensual acts as crimes.
Gold is a reasonable candidate because it has high inherent value -- it is available in limited supply on the one hand, and it has many uses, from coating the inside of fighter cockpits to plating connectors, to serving as a non-corroding surface and so on. Just because *you* don't have a use for it, doesn't mean that it doesn't have real economic value. Regardless, there is a world of difference between a piece of paper that has no inherent value at all, and a hunk of metal that can actually be used for something.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it is *probably not*. It *may* be, but since *nothing else* has presented us with that kind of problem, the odds of the brain doing so are pretty darned slim. You are postulating a heretofore never-achieved discovery in the course of determining how a mundane (by every indication) biological system, constrained as far as we know by the same physics and chemistry everything else is, operates. Considering the *fact* that there is no indication for such a discovery, I'd say you are way out on a creaky limb and you should be asking yourself how you got there.
There are 24 hours in a day, normal jobs take 8 or so, we sleep for 8 or so, weekends offer 32 more hours, that adds up to a *lot* of time for pursuing the tasks at hand without requiring any funding at all, presuming you are motivated and own a decent computer (I just bought an 8-core machine for under three grand, I wouldn't call that a "funding problem" for anyone with even a lightweight drive towards working on these problems.) This is -- I think -- an algorithm problem, not a hardware problem, which means that what you need is a language you can write in (free) and create powerful output (free) and you also might need to collaborate with others, which is also available for no more than the cost of a network connection and some additional free software. A terabyte of long term storage (HD) is about $200 right now, and getting less expensive all the time. Ergo, no funding problem. Unless I'm wrong, and hardware that cannot be simulated is required, which I *really*, *really*, *really* doubt, as nature has never presented us with such a case as yet. But I'll allow it as a possibility, because we're not there yet (though I'm willing to bet money against it... :-)
No, you have missed my point. An algorithm or algorithms is certainly required, and I never meant to imply otherwise. Human understanding of said algorithm(s), however, is explicitly not required. And there are many paths that lead to such a situation. Whether one of those will take us to a form of AI remains to be seen, which is what I was saying.
It is one thing to understand the mechanism required for operation -- it is quite another to understand the state it is in. I think you are confusing the latter with the former; the former is relatively trivial, and the latter is not required any more than a complete understanding of the state of everything involved at NASA is required in order to create, launch and recover the space shuttle. Complex systems are holistic, mostly co-operative combinations of subsystems, and as long as someone, somewhere, understands (or understood at one time, or possessed an adequate analogy to, or approximation of) the subsystems, or even the subsystems that make up the subsystems, that's sufficient to develop a fully functional macro system. And -- most importantly -- it only has to be done once, because of the unusual copyable nature of the result.
That's a *huge* claim; if it is true, you have AI now. Because -- as I explained in a previous post in this thread -- speed is absolutely irrelevant. If you can demonstrate your claim that your software operates now, no matter *how* slowly it operates, you are at the end of your funding issues, not to mention any other issues you may face in life. Which -- to be frank -- is why I doubt your claim. At the point you explicitly claim to be at, I'd already own a mega-yacht and be pulling up next to a lot of potential love.
But good luck, and I really mean that. I'd much rather be wrong and see you bring this right to the table, even if you have completely blown the financial potentials of the development process.
Most of us know jack about the algorithms that allow us to catch a baseball in flight, yet we can still do it. Furthermore, a person from 10000 BC with no math at all by today's standards could do it just as well as we can. Implementing solutions does not always require a complete understanding of what you've done. You can even be wrong and it'll still work for other reasons. So hard-pegging this to what we "know" could be a severe error.
That's a very bold statement, especially since (a) that's the way nature does it for all its intelligences, high and low, so we know the process works in the general case, and (b) as you say, we don't know many things yet, so claiming that we "know" what won't work seems to be disingenuous or at the very least not well thought out.
I think it is important not to conflate the fact that we don't understand something with the idea that it will be difficult once figured out or discovered as a consequence of some fortuitous sequence of events. That's been shown again and again not to be the case. It *may* be so, but it is by no means certain to be so, and for that matter, it isn't indicated by the complexity of the brain's hardware. The brain is considerably more formidable as a mass of immensely complex moderated connectivity than it is as a collection of cellular-level mystery machines, and a good deal of the complexity at the cellular level is almost certainly irrelevant to the task of thought -- keeping the cell alive is probably in no way related to non-pathological mental operation, yet there's a lot of hardware and systems involved in the task.
Well, let's look at the rate of general progress in computing. In 1971, we were putting 2300 transistors on a chip. They ran at a few hundred KHz. In a fairly smooth progression, we've gotten to 3 GHz, where we're likely to stay, and today, we're at about two billion transistors on a chip, with no end in sight as to how far that can go. This is not Moore's law; Moore's law is about how many fit into a particular space; this is about how many can be integrated into a functional unit. That's 36 years. Thirty six years from now, that ability to "simulate a few cells" should grow just in the *normal* scheme of things into an ability to simulate a billion or so cells without any trouble. But there's more to this. Not everything in a cell needs to be simulated; for instance, metabolic processes such as waste generation and removal don't, nor do breakdown, aging, impacts by free radicals, all of that. Part of what needs to be done between here and the goal is streamline the simulation so that it is operating in the zone of mentation and not biological imperatives. I suspect, and yes indeed this is just my opinion, that the simulation will be much easier when we understand just what it is we need to simulate.
This all leaves out the issue of non-simulating intelligence, where the thinking is not patterned after human mechanisms; this could arise from evolutionary software or something along those lines. And of course, one of the reasons that all this is kind of a holy grail anyway, only the first intelligence is difficult; the second... Nth is just a matter of copying a machine state.
As for language, that's solved in the I/o sense -- synthesis and "listening" are both satisfactorily complete. Intelligent discussion can only be expected from an intelligent machine, so that's only as far away as machine intelligence is.
Small animals, I'm of the opinion, are a lot more intelligent than most people give them credit for. They just have a different intelligence. I am sure that we will go through the small animal level on the way to our level, and beyond; the thing is, if you can do the one, you can do the other. There's no indication of a significant difference in the wetware, there's just more of it and it is arranged somewhat differently. No reason to expect anything different from hardware designed to do the same job.
Why? Small animals do both. Those aren't even the hard things. The hard things are introspection and self-awareness. Those are the ones we have not even a theory for, today. In any case, your ideas are certainly in with a lot of good company; but not me. I think we're only one discovery - algorithmic in nature - from AI. Self-awareness may turn out to be a property that self-organizes and arises without any special prodding from us; that would be marvelous, not to mention fortuitous, but hardly impossible - again, that's how nature did it.
Here's why I think we're just an algorithm away. If you left a question that absolutely required intelligence on a counter, and went back to pick it up the next day, and the answer was there -- you would agree that an intelligence had answered the question. If a human could answer it in one second, or an AI could answer it in 23 hours, it's still just as intelligent an answer when you pick it up. The point is that speed really isn't the issue. The issue is the process, that is, the algorithm. So it turns out that in terms of speed, number of transistors, etc, that's really not the limiting factor for developing intelligen
Speaking as an engineer and a (~40-year) programmer:
Odds are extremely good for beyond human AI, given no restrictions on initial and early form factor. I say this because thus far, we've discovered nothing whatsoever that is non-reproducible about the brain's structure and function, all that has to happen here is for that trend to continue; and given that nowhere in nature, at any scale remotely similar to the range that includes particles, cells and animals, have we discovered anything that appears to follow an unknowable set of rules, the odds of finding anything like that in the brain, that is, something we can't simulate or emulate with 100% functional veracity, are just about zero.
Odds are downright terrible for "intelligent nanobots", we might have hardware that can do what a cell can do, that is, hunt for (possibly a series of) chemical cues and latch on to them, then deliver the payload -- perhaps repeatedly in the case of disease-fighting designs -- but putting intelligence into something on the nanoscale is a challenge of an entirely different sort that we have not even begun to move down the road on; if this is to be accomplished, the intelligence won't be "in" the nano bot, it'll be a telepresence for an external unit (and we're nowhere down *that* road, either -- nanoscale sensors and transceivers are the target, we're more at the level of Look, Martha, a GEAR! A Pseudo-Flagellum!)
The problem with hand-waving -- even when you're Ray Kurzweil, whom I respect enormously -- is that one wave out of many can include a technology that never develops, and your whole creation comes crashing down.
I love this discussion. :-)
When you say a ground up rewrite, I worry. This is because the real-time nature of the OS is something that none of the other "big 3" have gotten right; there isn't a one of them that won't glitch your audio or video just at the wrong time (not that there is a right time.) BeOS was unique in that it was designed to be real time from day one and -- and this is the kicker -- they got it right. For the first time in modern OS history. So the issue here is, given that this is a rewrite to (presumably) R5 interface spec, will the underpinnings be of a similar nature, or will we simply have a fourth OS that can't handle real-time demands reliably?
But I don't look forward to the long climb up the curve of identifying and cleaning up what, going by past experience, is likely to be quite a nest of security issues.
Having said that, if it is actually like BeOS in that it handles multimedia similarly (that is, *really* well and without even a nod towards DRM), I'd be very likely to put some effort into using it. Linux's swap paradigm is completely unsuited to applications that need to respond *right now*, OS X is just about the same (it's only been a matter of hours since I shook my fist at Leopard for swapping out things I was using), and Windows... ugh. Going completely the wrong way.
I suppose it'll be a while yet, though. [prepares to wait]
The reasons really don't matter on a per-service or per-good basis; what we can observe is that the trend of the value of a dollar is the wrong way, and we need it to go the other way or at least stop moving the wrong way. Given that some things - medical care, for instance - are increasing in cost for reasons we're too stupid to control (torts, insurance), it is all the more important that our money *at least* retains the same purchasing power. It'd be nice if it had more, but it'd be nice if robots did everything for us at no cost, too.
Yes, it is. And it is a problem that extends the length and breadth of government regulation, from the number of windows in your house to the FCC's mismanagement of the airwaves.
Nope. Gold was (and is, for that matter - visit Utah sometime) used for roofs because it didn't corrode; roofs made from from it last amazing lengths of time. So do wall coverings and tapestries. It was used for vessels and implements because it was extremely malleable and ductile, and because it could be alloyed with other metals and still retain its relatively easy to work characteristics. It was used for art both because it was easy to work and because the resulting objects would last indefinitely if they were simply kept with care. It always had value because it has many useful characteristics, and it isn't particularly common. Given that it had value, it came to symbolize value - hence crowns and scepters and the like - and with that value, it came to symbolize care and wealth, thus adding to its value as jewelry. Bling.
Weaker than... what? Vulnerable to... what? Do you think for even one second that if we take our bases out of Germany, Russia will attack us? If we take our bases out of Saudi, you think Iran will build a fleet of transports and invade? If we take our bases out of South Korea, you think North Korea will nuke us? What are you smoking?
Personally, I don't think you know what "weak" and "vulnerable" even mean. Weak means our currency is no longer a world benchmark, vulnerable means we have to borrow to keep our economy from tanking on a regular basis. We are not the world's mommy, and we should stop pretending we are. We can't afford it, and they sure as heck aren't paying us enough to perform the service. You want to keep a forward base in another country? Fine. We can do that. Let me know when they're ready to foot the bill, plus set-up costs up front, and take-down costs in escrow.
In the meantime, we need to be working on achieving a balance of self-reliance and equitable trade.
I was handwaving, obviously there is more to it; but it doesn't matter in the least, because no matter *what* it is economists are doing, it isn't working and that is what matters. You can sing the praises of the complexity, sophistication and glory of economic theory and its practitioners until you're blue in the face, and not one word of it will make up for the simple fact that it takes more work today to heat a house, buy a house, educate your kid, and so on, than it did in 1965, and this has been a continuously wrong-ward trend. IOW, the economy is, and has been, moving very consistently in the wrong direction. So until whatever you have to say addresses that... you're just blowing smoke.
Taxes are paid in more dollars, which have arbitrary value, based on the fed's uncontrolled and unsupervised actions. It is a circular arrangement with an arbitrary amplifier / attenuator in the loop over which we have no control, and which appears to be operated by a spastic retard under the influence of hallucinatory drugs. The result of the system to date has been that it takes more labor to cover the same basic daily needs one used to be able to cover for less labor. That is the description of a broken system. No way around it. The goal cannot be to reduce the standard of living. That's insane. We need inherent stability in our currency, not some lunatic arbitrarily (or via some gaming system) making up what it means on a daily basis.
What is "clear" is that no matter how it is decided, it is not working well because the standard of living is dropping against the lower limits of income. You can go on all you like about the precise mechanisms used, all you're doing is enumerating and elaborating on what does not work. Because nothing you can say can show that it works. It doesn't work - real purchasing power for the fundamental necessities of life is dropping, with very few exceptions. The ability to buy a more affordable television doesn't make up for not being able to heat the house, or to take the kid to see the doctor. The fed has screwed the pooch. It is well past time to screw the fed.
That is ridiculous. What family living on a $5...$6 wage is going to be investing in gold? They're too involved in trying to find cheaper groceries and learning to live in coats with the thermostat set to 50f. You completely miss the entire focus of the issue at hand, which is the standard of living of the bottom level earners, not about me.
No, no, no. Look. Your argument is that because something is better, things are the same. The fact is, if you add value to something along with price until it is out of reach, it doesn't matter what you added. If a family can't come up with the $90 to see the physician, then it matters not at all to them that the physician would do a better job than the person they would have seen in 1965. If the car is safer, it doesn't matter to them if they can't afford to buy one. If the house is better constructed, it doesn't matter to them if they can't afford to buy it, or can't pay the payments and taxes on it.
These things are gradually being priced out of reach; it matters not one whit that the things themselves get shinier, sparkle more, or impress the neighbors in wholly new ways. What matters is can you afford a place to live, a place to raise your family, a competitive education, heating and cooling.
If you want to argue more features or higher quality, you have to keep the relative cost the same; because cost is an overriding factor that obviates the others. If you can't afford something, you're done, regardless of anything else you care to throw on the table. And don't try to offer borrowing, either, borrowing just makes things more expensive and moves the cost into the future, where it will be waiting to bite the naive buyer even harder. The idea of buying things on credit because you can't actually afford them now is inherently broken. It is just that the people who don't understand that (a very large number, sadly) are being victimized by the financial industry.
Does it? The last time I went to Europe (and mind you, I was traveling through fairly prosperous countries — England, France, Germany, Italy), I was appalled at the public squat toilets, the far too narrow streets, the high price of food and fuel and rent, the crushing taxation, the sublimated violence that turned into rage at sports matches, the oppressive anti-liberty political atmosphere (which has since mutated in some regions into an outright surveillance society, for example England), the binge drinking... I distinctly recall that most people didn't have air conditioning and that heat waves resulted in people dying in surprising numbers (well, not that surprising when you consider they basically got cooked because they had insufficient environmental controls for the living conditions they endured.) I remember being shown a tiny little stove that one young couple in London used as their entire heating system. Their kid was buried in a ball of flannel every hour of the day. It was bloody *cold* in that flat. I starkly remember being driven to nausea over the smell of the water in the canals in Venice and in the alleyways of London. When Europe's standard of living catches up to ours, then you can talk to me about how your economic policies are all that. Europe as a whole presents a very wide variety of living standards relative to lowest income, depending upon the country you're in and what issue you're looking at. The US is considerably more uniform, and frankly, my experience is that the US has been a far more prosperous place to live; not that it is anything like it could be, it isn't, but it is better than the countries I visited, certainly, on almost every level (we're still being really stupid about healthcare, though.) I think you'd make a considerably stronger point if you were talking about the most successful countries in Europe, and not Europe as a whole. The problem is that even if you can point to a successful fiat system, that doesn't make the next fiat system work, because the system itself isn't stable — it is the management of the system that makes it or breaks it, and our management system — the fed — is pathological from the starting line. What I advocate is a system that is stable in and of itself, and that is a system based upon commodities of real value. This resists opinion and knee-jerk responses from twisting up the finances of the day. In my opinion. This is *all* in my opinion, of course.
No, you can't. You'll be paid minimum wage, or you won't be working withing the system. You should read a little more carefully. Also, make sure you get all the way to the last paragraph; I directly addressed what happens when earnings are too low, which of course includes $0.
The fact is, without money -- a means to exchange for food -- you'll die. Therefore, if gold is money, gold has worth. You need to work on your ability to deal with abstracts.
Gold's value as art isn't because it is shiny, it is because it does not corrode. And there is no question that this is something that has appealed to people for a long time. However, that same characteristic gives it industrial value; that's why it is used for electrical connections, as well as its excellent ability to carry high levels of current (and heat.) Coatings of gold are used in fighter cockpits in order to control radar reflections without disturbing the pilots vision. Gold is used at extremely high purity as bonding wires to semiconductors -- there are quite a few of these in your computer, for instance. Gold is used in combination with other metals to obtain mixes of characteristics to which it contributes a great deal. So gold's value isn't all about bling; it has many significant uses in other areas.
No, that's not a problem at all. What that does is naturally adjusts the value of the the commodity, in this case, gold. Decreasing real prices (because of decreasing costs) against an unmoving commodity price is a good thing; it increases the standard of living. However, when the *actual* value of the commodity increases, and the amount of that commodity required to buy, say, a bushel of grain is now less, this has not changed the amount of value one has received for the current grain; what it does is increases the value of any of the commodity you have managed to save, though, and again in that way, it is of benefit to the citizens.
Let's say that on one Monday, X amount of gold, equal to one currency note, buys a cheeseburger. On a later Monday, gold has become scarcer or has found a new use that makes it more valuable, and now, .5X of gold buys a cheeseburger. Your wages were XY. Now, they are .5XY (because the notes are based on the relative value of gold.) Turns out that you still get a cheeseburger for one currency note. However, *if* you have gold, and not the note, you have enough for TWO cheeseburgers. Because you invested in the commodity (took a risk) as opposed to riding the community's trading scrip, which is there to provide a *stable* means of assigning value to everything else.
The problem with federal nothing-in-reserve notes is that they are inherently unstable. Instead of letting the economy expand and contract naturally with the amount of goods and services and labor available, the fed regularly reaches in and messes with how things are going based on how satisfied they are with the current situation (a state of mind which has NO direct link with goods, services or labor!) By doing so, they hugely modify how everything from investments to loans stand as assets and obligations at every level, but when they do so, the currency itself changes what it can do - IE, the price of a cheeseburger changes, even though there is no good, service or labor cost associated with cheeseburgers that has changed. This is management by fiat, and it is *not* a good thing.
But it is even worse than it appears. That is because, in order to lever the value of those notes, we end up borrowing actual value from other countries, with interest. That interest is a huge cost and that cost is paid by the taxpayers -- NOT by the fed. In order to pay that cost, the earnings (federal nothing in reserve notes) are taken away from citizens, leaving them with less ability to buy for the hours they worked. In other words, pushing them further downslope with regard to hours worked against goods and services that can be purchased. These aren't theories; these are the actual effects. And this is just the interest. Taxpayers will also have to pay back the principle, as well, eventually. Our kids or grandkids, etc. So what is happening isn't really an adjustment of current conditions; what it is, is a MOVE of conditions from now until time comes to pay the principle, with the additional load of having to pay the interest, which is considerable.
That you even ask the question is surprising to me. Minimum wage sets the floor at which jobs create an earner's ability to interact with the economy. Minimum wage also sets the base cost of anything that requires workers to create, be it product or service. From there, costs and wages go up as skills become scarcer. So minimum wage is a critical issue for both earners and job providers. Furthermore, minimum wage, by setting the earning level for the very lowest earning class of people who actually work within the system, places a hard line that cannot be crossed with regard to what such a worker can obtain within the system. You can't get below it, because you can't be paid less. An hour of labor gets you a minimum of $5.85, period. No less. About ten hours of work gets you one very short, very cursory doctor's appointment. An hour of work gets you about two gallons of gas. And so on. Earlier, you would have gotten more product or service, for less work on your part. This is a direct and concrete measure of economic conditions for the lowest class of earner, which is what I was talking about above.
This is irrelevant; there *is* one and there has been for some time, so we can use it to measure available standards of living at the lowest participating tier at any point during the period which it has been enforced. You want to argue economic issues based on a situation that does not exist. I am simply pointing out the situation that actually *does* exist. My observation is that given the demonstrated effect on earning and buying power that our current economic system has had at the base level, we are going backwards. What one would hope for is that purchasing power would increase, not decrease. It has, however, decreased in real terms, and because of that, I think change is called for.
Minimum wage *is* the actual wage paid for the lowest levels of people participating in the system. It has been since the 1930's or thereabouts. This gives you a direct lever, at the bottom, to relate an hour's work to the purchase of various goods and services. That's what I'm telling you: At the lowest economic level, it took less work to see the doctor in 1965 than it does today. That's going backwards. It took less work in 1965 to buy a house. That's going backwards. It took less hours of work in 1965 to buy a car. That's going backwards. It took less hours of work to buy a gallon of fuel. That's going backwards. It took less hours of work to put your kid through college or trade school. That's going backwards. It took less hours of work to buy heat for your home. That's going backwards. Life is getting more difficult for these people, not less difficult. That's going backwards. It is as plain as the nose on your face if you'll just stop and think about it for a minute.
There are areas in the economy where people get more for their hour of work (electronics is one such instance) but in general, and especially for the basic requirements of day to day life, the ratio of hours worked to products and services obtainable are all going the wrong way.
Proceeding in a course of action(s) that continues to make life more difficult for the lowest levels will eventually result in a situation where life within the systems is perceived as too difficult and people will turn to alternative means of making money; this is where black markets, under-the-counter wages, illegal products and services all gain a foothold in the economy. When working within the system fails to provide people with a tolerable lifestyle, they will look outside the system for relief. And furthermore, they will inevitably find such relief in a society that encourages out of bounds earnings mechanisms with laws that insist upon characterizing all manner of consensual acts as crimes.
Gold is a reasonable candidate because it has high inherent value -- it is available in limited supply on the one hand, and it has many uses, from coating the inside of fighter cockpits to plating connectors, to serving as a non-corroding surface and so on. Just because *you* don't have a use for it, doesn't mean that it doesn't have real economic value. Regardless, there is a world of difference between a piece of paper that has no inherent value at all, and a hunk of metal that can actually be used for something.