Not famliar with "rMorf"; Google can't seem to find anything prior to the 2000's about it, and the archives Google references that I looked at no longer have the files, other than one ZIP that appears to be defective. What's the history of rMorf?
As far as I know as of right now, first to market for desktop PCs is correct. The original code, which was a freeform point morphing engine, not a grid morpher, was written in early 1986 in 68000 assembler for the Amiga 1000, demonstrated in working form (though with a pretty basic UI) in a dedicated vertical package at the 1986 spring Comdex in Atlanta, in Commodore's Amiga booth (my company was one of Commodore's four featured developers, showing some PCB layout and schematic capture CAD in a showcase section of their Amiga booth... they generously put one of my CAD products in the Amiga software brochure, too, really gave me a terrific "kickstart") to some Commodore execs. In late 1991, in my next company, we began shipping a similar morphing engine for the Amiga within a more extensive image processing system aimed at, and priced for, consumers, written in c. I laid out the basis for the engine on a napkin at lunch in a Dairy Queen during the summer of 1991 and seeing my then-lead programmer's eyes light up), and we shipped a similar product for Windows shortly after that. After I retired, I made the EOL versions of both the Amiga and Windows image processing software (and some other things) freely available on the web. (Amiga / Windows)
Does rMorf predate my 1986 work, and if so, can you provide a reference for me? I'd be very interested to learn that was not first shipping package for an actual desktop PC. It's certainly possible, it's just news to me, and I'd need to rewrite some of my memoirs -- so I'd really like to know.:)
WRT to its name, you're obviously wrong that this should define your behavior without learning what the reality is (IOW, RTFM.) Also silly. Do you think Florida Sunkist oranges were actually kissed by the sun? Do you think that buying Photoshop puts a building on your property? Do you think that "everyone is created equal" means "everyone is actually created equal?" Do you think that Hostess Twinkies were made by or delivered by a "Hostess"? Do you think that because Chevy sells a truck as "the heartbeat of America" that somewhere in a Chevy truck's mechanical systems, you could apply a stethoscope and hear an actual heartbeat? Do you think that "Jet Blue" has completely blue jets? Do you think that Black and Decker tools are black, and are meant to deck people? Or meant to deck black people?
You're expected, quite reasonably, to use your head. You're expected, again quite reasonably, to RTFM in the case of anything that is new to you or otherwise not completely, blindingly obvious. If you go blundering into some undertaking without having done either or both, then the blame for adverse consequences of your chosen path is on you.
WRT to what this particular driver did, the driver let the autopilot system pilot the car into a truck. Fact. So either you're suggesting that the driver would have hit the truck anyway, or that they weren't monitoring the process adequately, which, again, Tesla specifically instructs usage as "don't do that."
As far as fixing stupid, and myself becoming lower tier: There are already a lot of people out there smarter than I am. I'm not crushed by this. I would gladly welcome more of them. Furthermore, I would consider not assuring a maximally intelligent outcome for human beings when the option was reasonably available to be... stupid.
Stagnate and die because "intelligence gets narrower" because everyone is smart? Hoo. Again, you're silly. Really, really silly. We're a lot more likely to suffer various and sundry serious adverse consequences because far too many people are not smart enough.
You can't fix stupid yet (genetic engineering will eventually, but not yet), and I don't think you should try. Yet. So I think the government's correct role (not that they would actually do this, of course) would be:
1) Person injured / dies doing X with Y
2) Check to see if X was explicitly ruled out as correct / safe by manufacturer of Y
3) Additionally check if X was blindingly obviously stupid (for example, shoot self in face with gun or follow GPS off cliff)
4) If 2 or 3 is true, issue closed, no investigation. If not, then okay, then open an investigation.
So yeah, if you ever sit on this side of the table you'll discover there are a lot of folks who aren't qualified to do the work they seek.
I've sat there. Way back when, I was on the interviewee side of the table, generally looking for either an EE or programmer job (or both.) I wasn't hugely impressed with most interviews, either. Later, having gone out on my own, I did the interviews myself, and later yet, after my companies had grown large enough, supervised those who did the interviews. My experience has been that if the job is specified well enough, and you don't suffer from application of non-skill-based criteria such as age, weight, credit report, arrest records, sex, degrees and certifications, and you don't proffer an abusive workplace or shitty remuneration, then there's no problem whatsoever hiring qualified people with sufficient or superior skill sets and quite easily recognized ability to learn. I've never, ever hired anyone who couldn't / didn't do the job they were hired for. Sure, yes, lots of people interviewed who weren't qualified by skill set. None were ever hired for something they weren't capable of either doing or learning. This was neither unexpected or a significant burden. It was a very rare unqualified or over-the-top abrasive person who didn't reveal their lack of suitability in just a few minutes of questioning. Not one made it to a job offer. Not in 30 years.
In software, my companies have done image and signal processing, both hardware and software. We put the very first morphing software for a desktop PC on the market, and our image processing / special effects software was used in myriad movies and television shows. We also did artificial life software, paint software, cross-assemblers, microprocessor emulators, and some of the earliest object-oriented CAD systems, among other things. We did absolutely top-notch technical support, second to none -- that's the thing I remain proudest of to this day. In hardware, we designed and manufactured graphics engines / accelerators; fax systems; status display systems; software oscilloscopes, FSK modems that were 100% DSP before DSP was a term on anyone's tongue; blitters; etc.
As to security clearances, I can't say. If you want to hurdle that particular wall, then you've bought into whatever requirements they lay on you from above, and yeah, I could see where, especially today, you'd have trouble. Fortunately, I'm mostly retired now, writing free software and only taking the occasional really interesting consulting job for myself, and I won't ever have to put up with that particular brand of oversight. Not that I ever did.
WRT criminal records, some of my best employees were those whom others had simply refused to hire for that very reason. None ever did my operations any harm at all, and a few were real stars.
I can't say I have any sympathy for operations that impose non-skill set criteria on their hires. No matter what size. it's a choice. Not an imperative. You make the choice, okay, certainly you can do that, but I am utterly deaf to your complaints about the consequences to you -- my sympathies lie entirely with the people who remain unemployed in the face of job opportunities they could handle perfectly well.
Elon Musk, in the person of his company, explicitly said this was not a hands-off system. The only assholes here are the people moaning about the moron who used it hands-off and got himself killed, Darwin-award-style.
1) Tesla: "Do not drive hands-off, maintain attention"
2) [Moron drives hands-off, or worse, attention off] FATAL ACCIDENT
3) Moron elements of society: have meltdown over perceived shortcoming, "investigation launched" by moron elements of government
The only useful thing that can be learned here for those of us who didn't already know, yet are able to learn, is that there are some morons out there with enough money to buy a Tesla and kill themselves by directly going against the manufacturer's instructions for safe use.
Well, okay, also, for those of us who didn't already know, yet are able to learn, there are other morons out there who are so blindingly stupid as to try to place the blame for this at Musk's / Tesla's feet. Some of those morons are in government.
I'm not entirely sure how, exactly, anyone could not already know these things unless they've been locked in a windowless room without human contact all their lives, or suffers an IQ less than their shoe size, or both, but... yet it is so.
Those 5 million workers are free to move around the EU to better labor environments.
So how easy is it, do you think, to pick up and move yourself (and possibly your family) from here to there, when you have only the dole as income, if that?
"Free to move" is only a valid statement if you have money to move with, not to mention a place to go where you will immediately find employment to pay your bills.
Which is to say, it's not usually a valid statement at all.
How do you reconcile your concept of LDNLS with evolutionary metaprogramming heuristics?
I see no need to reconcile it. Either a system is low-dimensional and not intelligent, or it's a generalized system with intelligence and can do pretty much anything.
If such a system were to gain a fully generalized thinking capability, it would not be LDNLS, because it would not be not low-dimensional.
I'm not saying that it could, just describing the bright line between the two ideas.
There's one other thing; it may be that there are non-neural routes to a general conscious intelligence. We know that nature has solved the neural intelligence problem at least two ways: the way we do it, and the way smart birds do it (higher neural densities, different brain structures.) The implication, as I take it, is that there's definitely more than one solution possible, and I (hand-wavingly) am willing to generalize that to "perhaps there's a non-neural way to host an intelligence." Algorithmic solutions are the most obvious suspect at this point, but they've been unable to get there so far.
I reject out of hand the idea that something that is not conscious is intelligent. That strikes me as purest marketing hype. The thermostat is not intelligent. No matter what the marketing claims.:)
Typically such "oh no I must choose which object hit" scenarios occur when the car is driving recklessly or the driver is inattentive, neither of which should apply to non-hacked self-driving cars.
Yeah, no. People stumble suddenly into the road. Pets dash across, as do children. Wild animals can arrive in-the-way faster than you'd believe possible if you haven't actually experienced it. Even really big ones.
The car won't be inattentive, and so it's a fair assumption that it should be able to do better than we would, but it isn't going to be able to avoid everything. At times, choices will have to be made.
Frankly, my position is "save the occupants of the car", because in the case of humans, we can tell then to stay the fuck out of the road and maintain positive control of their damned crotch-blossoms, and they should do so. If not, it's on them, and in the case of animals, much as I love them and feel that we should be their stewards and not their butchers and murderers, I still lean (barely) towards "save the occupants of the car first."
Of course, I also think we ought to make any roadway that carries traffic above 25 mph impossible for bicyclists, pedestrians, pets and wild animals to access, but Those In Power have decided that the number of lives lost to such open access is, in the final analysis, acceptable, as compared to the costs of making it happen. So I'm back to "save the occupants of the car first."
Hopefully we'll have our flying cars soon and creatures can walk the land without fear of such hurtling dangers. There's this fabulous thing, for instance.
LDNLS (which is what we have now, as opposed to actual intelligence, which requires consciousness) can be cobbled up in any basement, office or tent with a solar panel. It will do what its creators design it to do, because it is not in any useful sense of the word "intelligent", it is merely a neural-like system of very low dimensionality designed to do whatever the designer intended; that means it has at least a chance of doing so, if the design is good enough. AI — which, we note, contains the word "intelligence" — will do whatever it wants to do while reacting in its own way to various stimulation, just like the other intelligences we know: Humans, cats, dogs, mice, etc.
In the first case, designing for the factors that Nadella lists may be intended, or even legislated, but that in no way will prevent them from being ignored when it is convenient by government and other extra-legal entities. For instance, it's not legal to make various kinds of software, arms, drugs, etc,; but people do it anyway. This will be no different.
In the second case, that of an actual manufactured intelligence, we have absolutely no reason to think we'll have any absolute control at all, any more than we do over own biological children. You teach your kids what you want them to do, how you'd prefer they approach matters, inculcate them with classical music and before you know it they're wearing ghetto shorts, have a tattoo on their forehead, are sexting for fun, and playing drumz-n-bass in their car so loud you worry their eardrums are going to run into each other in the middle of their heads. IOW, there's no "designing" of an intelligence we've ever been successful at that didn't depend wholly on the particular intelligence one is trying to bias this or that way.
I suspect the who's-in-STEM-or-not issue will be a non-issue very shortly, as education planning, execution and employment cycles go. LDNLS systems will be doing serious design and software generation fairly soon. I think it's entirely possible that people currently in the educational system who are on, or plan to follow, STEM paths will find themselves coming out of school with the employability-equivalent of buggy-whip manufacturing skills.
That's without actual intelligence emerging. With it... same thing, but with social chaos as an added attraction.
Honestly, right now, the elephant in the room is the social safety net. We need to prepare something like basic income. If we don't get that set up and ready to go, socially speaking, I'm just about certain the sky is going to fall on us. Sure, it'll be fast-food workers and various pro drivers who become unemployed first, but there's no reason for it to stop there. Software generation is an extremely likely area for LDNLS to step into in a huge way. Chip design too. System design not too much longer after that, and that's going to put a very serious dent in the STEM job market.
One of my semi-recent Android OS updates also became infested with flat icons. Looks like crap compared to the release prior to it. Used to have some very sharp 3D-look icons. All gone. Looks like a cartoon now.
To be fair, they were probably just copying Apple, though. So yeah.
Obama is probably one of the most intelligent presidents we've ever had. He is an extremely intelligent person. Like him or despise him, he's been playing chess to congress's "angry checkers" for the entire seven-plus years he's been in office thus far.
The fact that you imply he is "dumb" identifies you as someone who has absolutely no clue what is going on.
lol. You assume or imply (why?) I was trying to make it to high office. I most certainly have not been doing that. Never threw my hat in the ring even once, for any public position. Nor do I ever plan to. I can't see how the government we have presently could possibly mutate into anything I'd want anything to do with, and it certainly isn't that now. My policy WRT the US government is "eat the bread, watch the circus, vote whenever possible."
The 2nd does not mention "guns." The 2nd talks about "arms", which certainly includes, but in no way is limited to, guns. It also includes IEDs, non-improvised explosives, knives, bats, caltrops, arrows, bombs, grenades, rockets, etc. The founders were familiar with them all. And you know what they put in the 2nd? Not "guns", not "muskets", not "flintlocks", but this:
Federal law, specifically the Posse Comitatus Act, restricts the use of the United States Army and the United States Air Force in enforcing US Federal Government domestic policy in the US
You should take a look at sections 1021 and 1022 of the NDAA bill, passed in closed-door committee meeting without any kind of hearing, and signed into law by President Obama in late 2011.
No, there is one, and only one, reason for that right. It's right there in that part of the sentence that gun advocates often leave out.
There's only one reason enumerated in the 2nd amendment, true enough.
However, if you are seriously going to argue that in 1790, the authors of the constitution were not considering hunting and self-defense as valid uses of arms... I'm afraid you've simply talked yourself out of any chance of being taken seriously.
Now about rights: Rights pre-exist the constitution. The constitution doesn't "give you" that right. What the constitution does is forbids the government from infringing on that right. Here, let's read it:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
See how that's written? It's an instruction to government. It's not an "award of a right." It was thoroughly understood that you had that right already. All the 2nd amendment does is tell the government they couldn't interfere with it.
If they do want to interfere with it, the only legitimate path offered by the constitution is found in article five, where the authorized mechanism to change the constitution itself is described.
Instead, the government is arbitrarily making laws that infringe. They have made many laws about specific arms you are forbidden to keep and carry. This is exactly the wrong (and unauthorized) way to go about solving problems. Why? Because if they can look at the 2nd amendment and say "nah, we're just going to do it the way we want to and to heck with that part", then this sets the stage for them to do it with the other amendments, and for that matter, parts of the constitution outside of the amendments.
And so it has played out. This precise kind of "nah, we'll just do what we want" behavior on the part of both the legislature and the judiciary has led to the de facto inversion of the commerce clause; search and seizure without warrant, probable cause, or specifics as to what is being searched for and what is to be seized; blatantly ex post facto laws that increase punishment after sentencing; government favoritism of specific religions; government taking of property for commercial purposes; government taking of property without warrant or due process; restriction of peaceful assembly; infringement on the right to keep and carry arms; compulsion to witness against one's self; the arrogation of rights that clearly belong to the states; and more.
So mid-level government positions rather than top level, as the post I responded to asserted. Congress writes the legislation that controls the regulatory agencies. The president directs the executive branch. That's as high up as you can get in those two branches; there is nothing higher. The assertion that "You have to be not actually dumb to get high up in government" is clearly false. The judiciary is different, in that those are appointments.
If you'd like to make the assertion that "You have to be not actually dumb to get appointed to a subordinate position in government or to the judiciary" that's fine. See if anyone argues with you. I won't. It's probably rare, at least.
Which is not to say that such appointed people are not often evil bags of shit, because of course they are.
You have to be not actually dumb to get high up in government
o U.S. President George Walker Bush. o U.S. Senator Ted Stevens. o U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann. o U.S. Representative Todd Akin. o U.S. Representative Joe Barton
I rest my case. I could go on, but it's really quite painful to think about.
I can't decide if Brennan is stupid, or if he thinks everyone else is stupid.
I readily admit this is not an uncommon reaction of mine when I read of the things presented by elected and appointed officials. The US government is a madhouse.
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh. Editing error, and of course it can't be fixed because Slashcode...
"and seeing my then-lead programmer's eyes light up"
Should have been
"and I well remember seeing my then-lead programmer's eyes light up"
Not famliar with "rMorf"; Google can't seem to find anything prior to the 2000's about it, and the archives Google references that I looked at no longer have the files, other than one ZIP that appears to be defective. What's the history of rMorf?
As far as I know as of right now, first to market for desktop PCs is correct. The original code, which was a freeform point morphing engine, not a grid morpher, was written in early 1986 in 68000 assembler for the Amiga 1000, demonstrated in working form (though with a pretty basic UI) in a dedicated vertical package at the 1986 spring Comdex in Atlanta, in Commodore's Amiga booth (my company was one of Commodore's four featured developers, showing some PCB layout and schematic capture CAD in a showcase section of their Amiga booth... they generously put one of my CAD products in the Amiga software brochure, too, really gave me a terrific "kickstart") to some Commodore execs. In late 1991, in my next company, we began shipping a similar morphing engine for the Amiga within a more extensive image processing system aimed at, and priced for, consumers, written in c. I laid out the basis for the engine on a napkin at lunch in a Dairy Queen during the summer of 1991 and seeing my then-lead programmer's eyes light up), and we shipped a similar product for Windows shortly after that. After I retired, I made the EOL versions of both the Amiga and Windows image processing software (and some other things) freely available on the web. (Amiga / Windows)
Does rMorf predate my 1986 work, and if so, can you provide a reference for me? I'd be very interested to learn that was not first shipping package for an actual desktop PC. It's certainly possible, it's just news to me, and I'd need to rewrite some of my memoirs -- so I'd really like to know. :)
WRT to its name, you're obviously wrong that this should define your behavior without learning what the reality is (IOW, RTFM.) Also silly. Do you think Florida Sunkist oranges were actually kissed by the sun? Do you think that buying Photoshop puts a building on your property? Do you think that "everyone is created equal" means "everyone is actually created equal?" Do you think that Hostess Twinkies were made by or delivered by a "Hostess"? Do you think that because Chevy sells a truck as "the heartbeat of America" that somewhere in a Chevy truck's mechanical systems, you could apply a stethoscope and hear an actual heartbeat? Do you think that "Jet Blue" has completely blue jets? Do you think that Black and Decker tools are black, and are meant to deck people? Or meant to deck black people?
You're expected, quite reasonably, to use your head. You're expected, again quite reasonably, to RTFM in the case of anything that is new to you or otherwise not completely, blindingly obvious. If you go blundering into some undertaking without having done either or both, then the blame for adverse consequences of your chosen path is on you.
WRT to what this particular driver did, the driver let the autopilot system pilot the car into a truck. Fact. So either you're suggesting that the driver would have hit the truck anyway, or that they weren't monitoring the process adequately, which, again, Tesla specifically instructs usage as "don't do that."
As far as fixing stupid, and myself becoming lower tier: There are already a lot of people out there smarter than I am. I'm not crushed by this. I would gladly welcome more of them. Furthermore, I would consider not assuring a maximally intelligent outcome for human beings when the option was reasonably available to be... stupid.
Stagnate and die because "intelligence gets narrower" because everyone is smart? Hoo. Again, you're silly. Really, really silly. We're a lot more likely to suffer various and sundry serious adverse consequences because far too many people are not smart enough.
You can't fix stupid yet (genetic engineering will eventually, but not yet), and I don't think you should try. Yet. So I think the government's correct role (not that they would actually do this, of course) would be:
1) Person injured / dies doing X with Y
2) Check to see if X was explicitly ruled out as correct / safe by manufacturer of Y
3) Additionally check if X was blindingly obviously stupid (for example, shoot self in face with gun or follow GPS off cliff)
4) If 2 or 3 is true, issue closed, no investigation. If not, then okay, then open an investigation.
Here, we have 2 and 3, so there you go.
I've sat there. Way back when, I was on the interviewee side of the table, generally looking for either an EE or programmer job (or both.) I wasn't hugely impressed with most interviews, either. Later, having gone out on my own, I did the interviews myself, and later yet, after my companies had grown large enough, supervised those who did the interviews. My experience has been that if the job is specified well enough, and you don't suffer from application of non-skill-based criteria such as age, weight, credit report, arrest records, sex, degrees and certifications, and you don't proffer an abusive workplace or shitty remuneration, then there's no problem whatsoever hiring qualified people with sufficient or superior skill sets and quite easily recognized ability to learn. I've never, ever hired anyone who couldn't / didn't do the job they were hired for. Sure, yes, lots of people interviewed who weren't qualified by skill set. None were ever hired for something they weren't capable of either doing or learning. This was neither unexpected or a significant burden. It was a very rare unqualified or over-the-top abrasive person who didn't reveal their lack of suitability in just a few minutes of questioning. Not one made it to a job offer. Not in 30 years.
In software, my companies have done image and signal processing, both hardware and software. We put the very first morphing software for a desktop PC on the market, and our image processing / special effects software was used in myriad movies and television shows. We also did artificial life software, paint software, cross-assemblers, microprocessor emulators, and some of the earliest object-oriented CAD systems, among other things. We did absolutely top-notch technical support, second to none -- that's the thing I remain proudest of to this day. In hardware, we designed and manufactured graphics engines / accelerators; fax systems; status display systems; software oscilloscopes, FSK modems that were 100% DSP before DSP was a term on anyone's tongue; blitters; etc.
As to security clearances, I can't say. If you want to hurdle that particular wall, then you've bought into whatever requirements they lay on you from above, and yeah, I could see where, especially today, you'd have trouble. Fortunately, I'm mostly retired now, writing free software and only taking the occasional really interesting consulting job for myself, and I won't ever have to put up with that particular brand of oversight. Not that I ever did.
WRT criminal records, some of my best employees were those whom others had simply refused to hire for that very reason. None ever did my operations any harm at all, and a few were real stars.
I can't say I have any sympathy for operations that impose non-skill set criteria on their hires. No matter what size. it's a choice. Not an imperative. You make the choice, okay, certainly you can do that, but I am utterly deaf to your complaints about the consequences to you -- my sympathies lie entirely with the people who remain unemployed in the face of job opportunities they could handle perfectly well.
Elon Musk, in the person of his company, explicitly said this was not a hands-off system. The only assholes here are the people moaning about the moron who used it hands-off and got himself killed, Darwin-award-style.
1) Tesla: "Do not drive hands-off, maintain attention"
2) [Moron drives hands-off, or worse, attention off] FATAL ACCIDENT
3) Moron elements of society: have meltdown over perceived shortcoming, "investigation launched" by moron elements of government
The only useful thing that can be learned here for those of us who didn't already know, yet are able to learn, is that there are some morons out there with enough money to buy a Tesla and kill themselves by directly going against the manufacturer's instructions for safe use.
Well, okay, also, for those of us who didn't already know, yet are able to learn, there are other morons out there who are so blindingly stupid as to try to place the blame for this at Musk's / Tesla's feet. Some of those morons are in government.
I'm not entirely sure how, exactly, anyone could not already know these things unless they've been locked in a windowless room without human contact all their lives, or suffers an IQ less than their shoe size, or both, but... yet it is so.
So how easy is it, do you think, to pick up and move yourself (and possibly your family) from here to there, when you have only the dole as income, if that?
"Free to move" is only a valid statement if you have money to move with, not to mention a place to go where you will immediately find employment to pay your bills.
Which is to say, it's not usually a valid statement at all.
You figure the Spanish headhunters were getting that 20-line shell script from Argentina, do you?
I see no need to reconcile it. Either a system is low-dimensional and not intelligent, or it's a generalized system with intelligence and can do pretty much anything.
If such a system were to gain a fully generalized thinking capability, it would not be LDNLS, because it would not be not low-dimensional.
I'm not saying that it could, just describing the bright line between the two ideas.
There's one other thing; it may be that there are non-neural routes to a general conscious intelligence. We know that nature has solved the neural intelligence problem at least two ways: the way we do it, and the way smart birds do it (higher neural densities, different brain structures.) The implication, as I take it, is that there's definitely more than one solution possible, and I (hand-wavingly) am willing to generalize that to "perhaps there's a non-neural way to host an intelligence." Algorithmic solutions are the most obvious suspect at this point, but they've been unable to get there so far.
I reject out of hand the idea that something that is not conscious is intelligent. That strikes me as purest marketing hype. The thermostat is not intelligent. No matter what the marketing claims. :)
Yeah, no. People stumble suddenly into the road. Pets dash across, as do children. Wild animals can arrive in-the-way faster than you'd believe possible if you haven't actually experienced it. Even really big ones.
The car won't be inattentive, and so it's a fair assumption that it should be able to do better than we would, but it isn't going to be able to avoid everything. At times, choices will have to be made.
Frankly, my position is "save the occupants of the car", because in the case of humans, we can tell then to stay the fuck out of the road and maintain positive control of their damned crotch-blossoms, and they should do so. If not, it's on them, and in the case of animals, much as I love them and feel that we should be their stewards and not their butchers and murderers, I still lean (barely) towards "save the occupants of the car first."
Of course, I also think we ought to make any roadway that carries traffic above 25 mph impossible for bicyclists, pedestrians, pets and wild animals to access, but Those In Power have decided that the number of lives lost to such open access is, in the final analysis, acceptable, as compared to the costs of making it happen. So I'm back to "save the occupants of the car first."
Hopefully we'll have our flying cars soon and creatures can walk the land without fear of such hurtling dangers. There's this fabulous thing, for instance.
LDNLS (which is what we have now, as opposed to actual intelligence, which requires consciousness) can be cobbled up in any basement, office or tent with a solar panel. It will do what its creators design it to do, because it is not in any useful sense of the word "intelligent", it is merely a neural-like system of very low dimensionality designed to do whatever the designer intended; that means it has at least a chance of doing so, if the design is good enough. AI — which, we note, contains the word "intelligence" — will do whatever it wants to do while reacting in its own way to various stimulation, just like the other intelligences we know: Humans, cats, dogs, mice, etc.
In the first case, designing for the factors that Nadella lists may be intended, or even legislated, but that in no way will prevent them from being ignored when it is convenient by government and other extra-legal entities. For instance, it's not legal to make various kinds of software, arms, drugs, etc,; but people do it anyway. This will be no different.
In the second case, that of an actual manufactured intelligence, we have absolutely no reason to think we'll have any absolute control at all, any more than we do over own biological children. You teach your kids what you want them to do, how you'd prefer they approach matters, inculcate them with classical music and before you know it they're wearing ghetto shorts, have a tattoo on their forehead, are sexting for fun, and playing drumz-n-bass in their car so loud you worry their eardrums are going to run into each other in the middle of their heads. IOW, there's no "designing" of an intelligence we've ever been successful at that didn't depend wholly on the particular intelligence one is trying to bias this or that way.
I suspect the who's-in-STEM-or-not issue will be a non-issue very shortly, as education planning, execution and employment cycles go. LDNLS systems will be doing serious design and software generation fairly soon. I think it's entirely possible that people currently in the educational system who are on, or plan to follow, STEM paths will find themselves coming out of school with the employability-equivalent of buggy-whip manufacturing skills.
That's without actual intelligence emerging. With it... same thing, but with social chaos as an added attraction.
Honestly, right now, the elephant in the room is the social safety net. We need to prepare something like basic income. If we don't get that set up and ready to go, socially speaking, I'm just about certain the sky is going to fall on us. Sure, it'll be fast-food workers and various pro drivers who become unemployed first, but there's no reason for it to stop there. Software generation is an extremely likely area for LDNLS to step into in a huge way. Chip design too. System design not too much longer after that, and that's going to put a very serious dent in the STEM job market.
Exactly. The entire premise of this is control of people. Time to block the IR port, kids.
I don't envy younger people; the world is turning into a liberties hellhole on them.
One of my semi-recent Android OS updates also became infested with flat icons. Looks like crap compared to the release prior to it. Used to have some very sharp 3D-look icons. All gone. Looks like a cartoon now.
To be fair, they were probably just copying Apple, though. So yeah.
Obama is probably one of the most intelligent presidents we've ever had. He is an extremely intelligent person. Like him or despise him, he's been playing chess to congress's "angry checkers" for the entire seven-plus years he's been in office thus far.
The fact that you imply he is "dumb" identifies you as someone who has absolutely no clue what is going on.
lol. You assume or imply (why?) I was trying to make it to high office. I most certainly have not been doing that. Never threw my hat in the ring even once, for any public position. Nor do I ever plan to. I can't see how the government we have presently could possibly mutate into anything I'd want anything to do with, and it certainly isn't that now. My policy WRT the US government is "eat the bread, watch the circus, vote whenever possible."
The 2nd does not mention "guns." The 2nd talks about "arms", which certainly includes, but in no way is limited to, guns. It also includes IEDs, non-improvised explosives, knives, bats, caltrops, arrows, bombs, grenades, rockets, etc. The founders were familiar with them all. And you know what they put in the 2nd? Not "guns", not "muskets", not "flintlocks", but this:
Arms.
You should take a look at sections 1021 and 1022 of the NDAA bill, passed in closed-door committee meeting without any kind of hearing, and signed into law by President Obama in late 2011.
TL;DR: Posse Comitatus, not so much these days.
There's only one reason enumerated in the 2nd amendment, true enough.
However, if you are seriously going to argue that in 1790, the authors of the constitution were not considering hunting and self-defense as valid uses of arms... I'm afraid you've simply talked yourself out of any chance of being taken seriously.
Now about rights: Rights pre-exist the constitution. The constitution doesn't "give you" that right. What the constitution does is forbids the government from infringing on that right. Here, let's read it:
See how that's written? It's an instruction to government. It's not an "award of a right." It was thoroughly understood that you had that right already. All the 2nd amendment does is tell the government they couldn't interfere with it.
If they do want to interfere with it, the only legitimate path offered by the constitution is found in article five, where the authorized mechanism to change the constitution itself is described.
Instead, the government is arbitrarily making laws that infringe. They have made many laws about specific arms you are forbidden to keep and carry. This is exactly the wrong (and unauthorized) way to go about solving problems. Why? Because if they can look at the 2nd amendment and say "nah, we're just going to do it the way we want to and to heck with that part", then this sets the stage for them to do it with the other amendments, and for that matter, parts of the constitution outside of the amendments.
And so it has played out. This precise kind of "nah, we'll just do what we want" behavior on the part of both the legislature and the judiciary has led to the de facto inversion of the commerce clause; search and seizure without warrant, probable cause, or specifics as to what is being searched for and what is to be seized; blatantly ex post facto laws that increase punishment after sentencing; government favoritism of specific religions; government taking of property for commercial purposes; government taking of property without warrant or due process; restriction of peaceful assembly; infringement on the right to keep and carry arms; compulsion to witness against one's self; the arrogation of rights that clearly belong to the states; and more.
Nah. Cooking's being done by the legislators, their appointed minions, and the courts.
Congress: 94% re-election rate last time around. Justices: "Constitution? Why, I had a bowel movement just yesterday, thank you."
The sheep are just milling around confused, as is the habit of sheep.
Sheep stew cooked up by our very own oligarchy, with just a soupçon of lip-service.
So mid-level government positions rather than top level, as the post I responded to asserted. Congress writes the legislation that controls the regulatory agencies. The president directs the executive branch. That's as high up as you can get in those two branches; there is nothing higher. The assertion that "You have to be not actually dumb to get high up in government" is clearly false. The judiciary is different, in that those are appointments.
If you'd like to make the assertion that "You have to be not actually dumb to get appointed to a subordinate position in government or to the judiciary" that's fine. See if anyone argues with you. I won't. It's probably rare, at least.
Which is not to say that such appointed people are not often evil bags of shit, because of course they are.
I didn't exactly forget her. I just stopped listing idiots after I got to five.
o U.S. President George Walker Bush.
o U.S. Senator Ted Stevens.
o U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann.
o U.S. Representative Todd Akin.
o U.S. Representative Joe Barton
I rest my case. I could go on, but it's really quite painful to think about.
I can't decide if Brennan is stupid, or if he thinks everyone else is stupid.
I readily admit this is not an uncommon reaction of mine when I read of the things presented by elected and appointed officials. The US government is a madhouse.