it would be like misprogramming your toaster or the mars rover.
So you enter into an argument where someone is saying, "Supposing we could create real AI, we should assume that it would be dangerous," and you're trying to argue, "No, it wouldn't be, because it wouldn't be a real AI." It's hypothetical.
Even if you're right that it's not possible, your response isn't helpful. It's like if I said, "Supposing for the sake of argument that Leprechauns were real, and you could wish for money, fame, or political power. Which would you choose?" and you responded, "I would choose none of them, because even in your hypothetical scenario, I'm going to assume that Leprechauns couldn't actually be magical and grant wishes." Well fine. I don't have an argument, but what do you think that you're accomplishing here?
It seems to me that you may even be right, that we can't create a true AI using any conventional computing technology. I myself have argued in many cases that I think computer scientists misunderstand and underestimate the problem, and that we are far away from being able to create a true form of AI. However, that's not relevant to what I was talking about in this thread.
Ok, well I don't know what those things are supposed to mean to me. "Conforming more than conforming," doesn't seem particularly meaningful, and there's nothing new about conformity. The basic phenomenon of people conforming to trends isn't remotely new.
And going back to your earlier post, I don't think the hippie thing was really about love-- though there were hippies who claimed that was what it was about, the emo thing was definitely not about fear, and hipster thing is certainly not about hatred.
Where are you getting your theories and terminology? What is "ultra conformity" vs. normal "conformity"? Is this some new sociology term, or are you making this up?
Well I actually know what a hipster is, but I'm still not sure you quite do. They're not hippies or emos. Now, you could look at any trend or any set of trends, whether it's enjoying rap and hip-hop, wearing cowboy hats, or shopping at the GAP, or wearing a scarf, and say, "Some people are just doing this as a fashion statement, and some people are doing this to conform." That's not very informative about the actual trend.
What's more, I'm sure you follow certain trends, so I'm not sure what makes you so angry about the whole thing. Do you listen to music that's popular among some group? Do you wear clothes that are considered nice or at least appropriate within your social circle? Congratulations, you're someone who is going along with some trend of fashion sensibility. You may say, "But I don't do it because it's trendy! I do it because I like it!" That's what everyone says, and there are people within any given trend for whom it's actually true. But none of this has to do with hipsters.
And you're equating all of these groups, but here on Slashdot, I don't see a lot of people complaining that KDE is succumbing to the emo kids, or that Microsoft Office is being built by hippies. But all over the place, I see random nonsensical references to "hipsters" that lead me to believe that nobody actually knows what a hipster is, and nobody has any definition for the word "hipster" other than "something I don't like." What's kind of amazing is how angry people get, blaming everything that they don't like on "hipsters" while they seem to have no idea what a hipster is, and that's the part that I don't understand.
First, we have to set aside the question of whether real AI is possible. We could argue about that, and on Slashdot I'm sure different people would come down on different sides of that argument, but it's really not the point. The issue that was raised was, taking as an assumption that we could create such a thing, would that resulting entity be dangerous.
Now you're assuming that such a entity would be reliable on an external electrical power source, would be unable to secure power on its own, unable to maintain itself without people, and in spite of having a superior intellect resulting in technology we don't have today, it would be unable to solve any of these problems. I wouldn't be willing to take all of that for granted, but even if all that is assumed to be true, there's still a problem.
We'd have an entity that was smarter than us, which would also strongly imply that we were not capable of understanding its full motivations and decision-making process. I'm not saying it would conquer the world; I'm suggesting that we don't know what it would decide to do or how it would decide to do it. Given the way things work between conscious entities, it's pretty certain that it would eventually decide to do something that we wouldn't be happy about.
Now that doesn't seem like too big of a problem as long as you treat it like a dangerous thing. Keep it dependent on people. Have someone man a "kill switch" that reboots the AI, clears its memory, cuts off its contact to the rest of the world, or even completely turns it off. No problem, right? So what I'm saying here is, no, there's still a bit of a problem in that, if we assume that the AI is significantly more intelligent than us, we wouldn't know what it would or could do. It would be like a bunch of monkeys looking at a man and saying, "well he's bigger than us, but we outnumber him, and he's far away from us, so we're safe," being completely ignorant of how a rifle works. It would be foolish to believe that a significantly superior intelligence would operate in predictable ways according to the limits that we understand.
Now I'm not in any way suggesting that we shouldn't be developing basic AI systems, or even that we shouldn't be attempting to build a real AI. I'm just suggesting that the whole field is dangerous, and the imagined, "true AI that is vastly more intelligent than we are" does represent a very serious danger.
I don't considering that most human beings are incapable of higher level thought. Right now most citizens throughout the world are voting against their own interests.
I didn't suggest anywhere that such an AI would necessarily exhibit anything that we'd recognize as 'wisdom'. It could very well act against its own interests. The idea that it could be foolish should only add to the idea that it would be dangerous.
I see what you're saying now. Wikimedia is claiming that they need all this money just to keep the doors open for the Wikipedia, and you think that potential donors should be informed that it's really not that. If Wikimedia were being honest, they should say that the money is to fund continued development on various projects, which is something that donors may be less interested in funding.
If Wikipedia is supposedly an "open" and "inclusive" project, such censorship shouldn't be necessary, right?
I can imagine a possibility where it's somewhat valid. I think there are some people who manufacture scandals everywhere. I suspect that sometimes these people are sincere, and sometimes these people are trolls who like poking people in the eye, but they find some minor issue somewhere and blow it up to be a huge, world-changing scandal. And sometimes, when these people are very clever, they do it in such a way that it seems like it could be valid. It can work out similar to conspiracy theories. The conspiracy theory equivalent might be "If Bigfoot doesn't exist, then why does the government keep removing my requests from their forum to declassify all information regarding Bigfoot?!" But you know, it's really just a loony guy posting inflammatory comments to an inappropriate forum. Maybe it'd be better to just let it go, but removing the comments don't amount to a cover up.
I'm not saying that's what it is. I'm involved in the whole situation. I donated to the Wikipedia a few years ago, and I do think it's an important resource which I sometimes use, but that's my limit of knowledge and involvement in that whole world. I just don't like to jump to conclusions, and I don't appreciate when people sensationalize situations and create scandals where there is none.
then I'm not sure you will be satisfied by any demonstration short of the donors' money being used to pay for a $1300 steak dinner for four (http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Allegations-swirl-around-Wikipedia-s-Wales-3225462.php ), or a $50,000 stipend being used to help a donor's husband insert plagiarized content into Wikipedia (http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/04/01/business-as-usual/ ). But there's no way such grossly improper activities have ever transpired at the Wikimedia Foundation, right?
No, those do seem like valid complaints and problems. Again, I'm not familiar with them, but they actually sound like possible wrongdoing.
However, going back to this:
Sue Gardner expanded the code developer staff from about 20 to about 120, then had them working on software enhancements that the Wikipedia community didn't ask for...
That seems to be... well, it could be good or bad. Really I'm just pointing out that this doesn't, in itself, make sense as a complaint. For one thing, the expansion of developers comes down to a question of whether it's warranted. It's not bad in itself. The idea that they are working on things that "the Wikipedia community didn't ask for," doesn't tell us anything, since various companies and groups work on things that people didn't ask for, but none the less someone thought was a good idea. I don't think anyone really asked for the Wikipedia itself, but once it was there, people liked it.
And beyond that, apparently one of the things that "the Wikipedia community didn't ask for" was a WYSIWYG editor...? (that's my understanding of this talk of a "visual editor") I'm sure someone was asking for it. It seems like you're oversimplifying and saying, "I didn't want it, and some other people didn't want it, therefore nobody wanted it." Surely someone wanted it. I'll say that I've provided edits to the Wikipedia, and I've set up my own wikis, and I would have liked a WYSIWYG editor.
The fact that some people weren't happy with the outcome of the software development... I find that unimpressive evidence of wrongdoing. You could make the greatest thing ever, and some people would be unhappy with it. What do you think was the motivation of expanding their development staff and building additional tools, if you don't think they intended to build something that they thought was a good idea?
So yes, obviously, if you can find evidence of actual wrongdoing-- misuse of funds, accepting bribes, politically and personally motivated edits-- then that seems like a serious issue that should be pursued and exposed. But, "some people who contribute to the Wikipedia don't like that Wikimedia employs programmers," hardly seems like a scandal.
That's because this is Slashdot and you haven't bothered to actually read TFA.
I actually skimmed them, but there are 5 articles, including what seems to be Wikimedia's budget report. I'm not going to read all of that in detail unless someone can explain what the real problem is.
It seems like your complaints (and these were also in the various articles) boil down to two things:
A) They don't spend all of their money on content: Well, I wouldn't expect them to. My understanding was the the Wikipedia has always relied on volunteer contributions, and the idea was that it always would. I'm not familiar with the inner politics of the thing, but it seems like they're largely providing the platforms for volunteers to create content on, and obviously those platforms will cost money. If you had asked me yesterday (before I heard about this controversy) to guess what Wikimedia spent their money on, I would have guessed "Mostly hosting, web/software development, and administrative overhead." I wouldn't have guess they spent very much on content at all.
B) They released some tools for editing content and viewing media, and some people (perhaps "a lot of people" or even "most people") didn't like these tools: It's not clear to me what the real problem here is. Do you think that they should not have programmers attempt to improve their platform? Do you think that they shouldn't pay those programmers? Do you think that it's fine to try to improve the platform and pay programmers, but they just did a bad job? If it's the last one, then it seems like the issue isn't a complaint about the budget as much as "I'm just not happy with the output of the developers." Maybe they should get new developers or something, I don't know.
And then there's this:
Less than 6% of the WMF budget is spent on Internet hosting even though most people probably believe it’s their biggest expense. Meanwhile, they spend almost as much money (about $2 million) on travel and conferences. There is also a huge bucket for “other operating expenses” totaling nearly $12.5 million — some of which certainly pays for expensive downtown office space in San Francisco.
Ok, so that seems like a lot of money to spend on traveling and conferences, what what was the effect of that? Were those conferences things that they shouldn't have gone to or presented at? If you want me to be angry, I think you need to paint me a picture. Did they spend so much money because they were flying a single guy around in a private jet, or were they flying around a lot of important people to important conferences, paying for conference materials and placement, in a way that resulted in some improvement to Wikimedia? You say they spent money on office space in San Francisco-- is that unusual and unreasonable for a company in their position? Did they spend too much? Or is the problem simply that they've thrown so much money into "other operating expenses" without breaking it down to allow us to determine whether those expenses are valid?
I just feel like I'm supposed to be outraged, but I don't really see what the problem is, other than a vague sense of "They're spending lots of money, and we don't think that it should cost that much." Having run a business, I know that a lot of things end up costing more than you'd suppose that they would.
Then you are a shining example of someone who has accepted the Wikimedia Foundation's spin.
I don't think so. This is the first I'm hearing about the whole issue, so I haven't been exposed to spin. I was just saying that, as someone who is completely unfamiliar with the controversy, the person writing the summary didn't come close to making a case that there was a problem. I skimmed the articles, too, and it didn't seem clear what the real problem was there. It's clear that they're not spending all of their money on paying for content, and that they've developed some software tools that some people don't like. Ok, got it. I still don't feel like there's been a demonstation that they're doing something improper.
I've seen a lot of people on Slashdot (and other places) dismiss this kind of thing as silly. They say you're a Luddite, or say that you've been too influenced by scifi movies.
I think, however, that part of the reason scifi writers have written stories about out-of-control AIs so many times is that it should be a valid concern. If you create an entity with its own volition and motivations, then there's the real possibility that it's goals my not adhere to your goals. If you allow that entity its own judgment, then it's very possible that its judgments regarding morality will differ from yours. You may look at a course of action, including the trade-offs between benefits and detriments, and have a different judgement about whether the detriments are acceptable. If you gave such an entity power to act in the world, it's very likely that at some point, it will do something that you did not intend, and that you do not approve of.
What's more, if that entity achieves a level of intelligence that is beyond what people can achieve, it opens up the very real possibility that it could trick us. It could anticipate our reactions better than we could anticipate its plan. So if such an intelligence wanted to accomplish something that we would not approve of, it's possible that it could set things in motion through seemingly minor interactions, and we would not be able to know the AI's intention before it was too late. If an AI wanted to destroy humanity, it wouldn't necessarily need to have control of a nuclear arsenal. Accomplishing such a thing might be as simple as providing misleading analytics about an impending environmental disaster. It might be as simple as the AI saying, "Hey, here's a cool new device I think we should make." It could provide the schematics of a device that would seem to do one thing, but if we're incapable of understanding how the device works, there might be some entirely different purpose.
...but the fact is that Wikimedia spending has increased by 1,000 percent in the course of a few years... most of these budget increases have nothing to do with keeping Wikipedia online and ad-free, and nothing to do with generating and curating Wikipedia content...The skyrocketing budget increases are instead the result of a massive expansion of paid software engineering staff...
So from this information alone, I'm not sure I see the problem. You have a very large website that I'm sure gets unimaginable amounts of traffic, operating for free and supported by voluntary donations, and their budget is increasing because they've hired engineers to keep the thing running. That all sounds reasonable enough.
I think if you want to raise a red flag here, you have to show that the software engineering staff is unwarranted, or that they're working on things that the donors don't want to see done. So how many engineers do they have, and what are they working on? It seems to me that they're doing a competent job, since you have a relatively large, complex, and popular website that doesn't seem to have a lot of serious technical trouble, as far as I can tell. I'm sure they've had to scale up their capabilities over recent years, which requires some development in making the site scale and handle large, sudden increases in traffic. It looks to me like they're doing more than just maintain the Wikipedia-- they have the Wiktionary, Wikiquote, something called "Wikidata", and a bunch of other projects that all seem like they're probably legitimate, even if I don't know what they are. In that context, I can imagine them needing to keep a fair number of engineers on staff.
So what's the complaint here? Do you think someone is embezzling money, or that they're just stockpiling money for no reason? Do you think that they're spending money in the wrong places, and if so, where you do think they're spending money, and where do you think they should be spending money? I think you need to give me something before I can figure out how to be outraged at all of this.
They've all become rotten hipster cults..."we know better than you" hipster attitude toward user complaints...
This is off-topic, but can we just stop using the word "hipster" to mean "something I don't like"? It's really ridiculous, and I don't know why I seem to be the only person who finds the over-use of the word grating.
Some people on Slashdot have gotten really weird about the complaints about "hipsters". Using systemd does not make you a hipster. Microsoft Windows is not a 'hipster operating system'. I don't even know what you're intending to imply by using that word. I asked someone on Slashdot what they meant by "hipster" and they said that hipsters were people who "did things inefficiently".
This hipster obsession is really pretty bizarre. Admittedly, it's kind of fascinating, and if someone could explain to me what the deal is, I'd be interested. But aside from that, can we all please just stop using that word unless you can actually use it properly?
I think part of the reason people don't contribute is that, whether it's deserved or not, there's a perception that open source projects aren't friendly and aren't welcoming of input from "normal people". I can say that I've been in situations where I submitted a bug and had it ignored or else told that it wasn't a priority and the developer didn't care. I've offered feedback on ways that I thought the software could be improved, and was essentially told, "If you want that done, write it yourself. I'm just here to scratch my own itch." In a number of situations when I've participated in forum discussions, I've encountered the attitude that if you're not a programmer that can contribute code, you should butt out of the conversation.
There was one instance where I actually paid programmers to fix something in an open source project that my company needed to have fixed, and the project would not accept the fix for some reason they wouldn't explain. To be clear, this wasn't a new feature or some kind of redesign, but there was an open source project that wasn't working, we paid a couple of programmers to fix it and make it work, they were successful, and even those programmers (who had experience contributing to FOSS) were surprised when the fix was rejected without explanation. That's fine, since my company got what we needed out of the software once it was fixed, but I doubt anyone else ever got to benefit from the fix.
Now, I'm not claiming that these handful of experiences represent every open source project out there. I'm sure there are projects that are very welcoming, but I haven't really experienced that. You ask why I don't contribute? It'd because nobody has asked, and my attempts to help have not been welcomed. And then when I've explained this on Slashdot before, people respond saying something like, "Well you need to approach the community in the right way. They have their own way of doing things, and you should spend time to learn about the community and do things the way they want things done, and then I'm sure they'll welcome your contributions."
Which... you know... fine. Maybe that's true. But honestly, I don't care that much. My motivation to contribute my time and effort for free is pretty limited to begin with, and if people are going to make it even harder and less pleasant, then I'm not going to bother.
I suspect it's actually cheaper to get drunk or high than it is to pay for rehab. If it were necessary, I could come up with a few other reasons why I disagree with you.
Relativity is a description of the geometry of the universe. If you would rather believe in your own personal fantasies instead of one of the most well-supported theories in science, congratulations, you are yet another variety of religious loon.
I don't quite agree. There's a mistake in your viewpoint, I think, which is to assume that the progress of science consist in the development of a final theory which bears no modification, and then people disproving that theory because it's wrong, and using evidence to develop the correct theory which also bears no modification, and then you're done. Like, well... we've developed relativity, and that's working really well, so there's nothing else to do there.
It's a very common idea, but it's not quite how things have traditionally worked. People talk about "the theory of evolution" and "the theory of relativity", but in reality there are a lot of sub-theories which continue to develop. We know that somehow life forms evolve and change, and Darwin had a theory about exactly how that happened, and there have been many additions and modifications since that time. We now have a set of currently accepted theories about how various mechanisms in evolution work, and many of those may well be shown to be false, and many more may need modification. But more than that, sometimes there are other ways of looking at things which result in subtly different theories, which are neither quite "true" or "false", but just different ways of looking at things. You can look at a person as an individual organism, or you can look at it as a colony of cells, or you can look at it as a component of a "pack" or a "gene pool". These are all modifications and sub-theories of "evolution". And this is why I object when people argue with creationists by claiming that "the theory of evolution has been proven to be true, and there's no more arguing to be done." No, that's not quite right. We can say with a very high level of certainty that life began as simple forms a very long time ago and evolved to provide the diversity and complexity that we see today, but the exact path and timing is still disputable, and the theory for exactly how that happened is constantly being revised. The exact scientific "theory of evolution" is not set in stone, but the overall concept of evolution is undoubtedly true.
Now that may seem like a tangent, and I'm sorry for that, but I found it easier to describe the idea using evolution rather than physics. It's important, though, since the theory of General Relativity is similar. When Newton developed his theories about the motion of celestial bodies, people saw how clearly this lined up with what we see, and said, "Yes, this is obviously true. No doubting it." And essentially, Newton was right. Unless you have read prior writings on the subject, it might be difficult to understand just how groundbreaking his ideas were, but now we take his physics for granted because they're so fundamental to our current understanding of the world. However, in the time since his work, we've found that his model of the universe doesn't quite work. Einstein seized on one of the ways that it doesn't work, and he made some major changes in the way we view space and time. Those changes, again, made us say, "Yes, this is obviously true. No doubting it." because of how clearly they lined up with the discrepancies with Newton's theories, but ultimately the discrepancies are so mild that we rarely calculate things using Einstein's work. It overturned our Newtonian theory about how and why things work the way that they do, but it didn't quite overturn Newton's work. Most of Newtonian physics still work under most of the circumstances we encounter, and we only bother with relativity when dealing with specialized circumstances.
And so the same might happen with Einstein's work. Someone might pick apart some discrepancy and provide a different explanation for time and space in a way that allows Newton's and Einstein's
You're right in that it makes no sense to spend money trying to develop this technology. It'd make more sense to spend money on various kinds of scientific research, and see where the scientific advancements take us. If it's possible to travel through wormholes, studying physics should eventually lead us to the groundwork for doing that, but it makes no sense to spend money on trying to advance a particular scifi technology when the groundwork isn't there.
But was anyone (other than some AC) actually suggesting that we spend money on wormhole technology? That's the part that confuses me. You have a science fiction movie where people discover an existing wormhole, a scientists with his panties in a bunch because he feels like that's unrealistic, and then the scientific adviser on the script agreeing that it's not realistic.
I kind of love how crazy the internet is. Suddenly a discussion about whether Interstellar's depiction of wormholes is accurate turns into a a contentious argument about the 2008 bailout. What a country.
to make the move more scientifically accurate than what Nolan could do on his own
Not completely scientifically accurate-- certainly not completely within the bounds of what we currently know about science-- but more than it would have otherwise been. It's not clear to me that he failed at all, especially since scientific accuracy doesn't seem to be Nolan's general goal in film-making. Or are we to believe that you can invade people's dreams, and that Tesla invented an electrical matter duplication machine?
Just to clarify, I believe Kip Thorne is the physicist who was a consultant on Interstellar, who made efforts to make the move more scientifically accurate than what Nolan could do on his own, and he's defending the movie to some extent. It's Lee Billings who is complaining that it's not scientifically accurate.
Yeah, the blog post seems a little insane to me. I get it when Neil deGrasse Tyson complains about things like, in some movie the Earth spins the wrong way, or if the constellations are wrong for the time that the movie takes place. He's nit-picking and he knows it. He's pointing out interesting scientific inconsistencies. It might possibly be educational, and he's showing off his knowledge and attention to detail, and whatever, that's fine.
But this guy is actually complaining that the movie depicts a stable wormhole that we can travel through. His problem with it is, scientifically, we have no reason to think that it's possible, though we don't strictly know. Did he think that either Christopher Nolan or the audience was not aware that we can't create wormholes?
Even in the movie, it's not depicted as something that's easy to create. But that's beside the point, really, since it's a science fiction movie that is just positing that such a thing is possible for the sake of building a plot around that supposition. It's like complaining about Jurassic Park on the grounds that, "It's unlikely that we'll ever be able to clone dinosaurs from ancient mosquitoes formed in amber." Or complaining about the movie E.T. because, "We've never been visited by extra-terrestrial life forms-- at least not so far, not as far as we know..."
In my opinion raids are good overall... Most people i meet that bash on raids on raids either had a bad experience with early raid controllers or don't understand what a raid has to offer let alone how to configure one properly.
Wait... who doesn't think that RAIDs are good? RAIDs are... well it's not ever really an issue of good or bad. They're a pretty fundamental part of modern computing, particularly when dealing with servers. But that's not the point. The point is, they're not really a backup. That's not bashing RAIDs any more than it's a complaint against hard drives to say that a hard drive isn't a video card.
Slashdot Mirror
it would be like misprogramming your toaster or the mars rover.
So you enter into an argument where someone is saying, "Supposing we could create real AI, we should assume that it would be dangerous," and you're trying to argue, "No, it wouldn't be, because it wouldn't be a real AI." It's hypothetical.
Even if you're right that it's not possible, your response isn't helpful. It's like if I said, "Supposing for the sake of argument that Leprechauns were real, and you could wish for money, fame, or political power. Which would you choose?" and you responded, "I would choose none of them, because even in your hypothetical scenario, I'm going to assume that Leprechauns couldn't actually be magical and grant wishes." Well fine. I don't have an argument, but what do you think that you're accomplishing here?
It seems to me that you may even be right, that we can't create a true AI using any conventional computing technology. I myself have argued in many cases that I think computer scientists misunderstand and underestimate the problem, and that we are far away from being able to create a true form of AI. However, that's not relevant to what I was talking about in this thread.
Ok, well I don't know what those things are supposed to mean to me. "Conforming more than conforming," doesn't seem particularly meaningful, and there's nothing new about conformity. The basic phenomenon of people conforming to trends isn't remotely new.
And going back to your earlier post, I don't think the hippie thing was really about love-- though there were hippies who claimed that was what it was about, the emo thing was definitely not about fear, and hipster thing is certainly not about hatred.
Where are you getting your theories and terminology? What is "ultra conformity" vs. normal "conformity"? Is this some new sociology term, or are you making this up?
Well I actually know what a hipster is, but I'm still not sure you quite do. They're not hippies or emos. Now, you could look at any trend or any set of trends, whether it's enjoying rap and hip-hop, wearing cowboy hats, or shopping at the GAP, or wearing a scarf, and say, "Some people are just doing this as a fashion statement, and some people are doing this to conform." That's not very informative about the actual trend.
What's more, I'm sure you follow certain trends, so I'm not sure what makes you so angry about the whole thing. Do you listen to music that's popular among some group? Do you wear clothes that are considered nice or at least appropriate within your social circle? Congratulations, you're someone who is going along with some trend of fashion sensibility. You may say, "But I don't do it because it's trendy! I do it because I like it!" That's what everyone says, and there are people within any given trend for whom it's actually true. But none of this has to do with hipsters.
And you're equating all of these groups, but here on Slashdot, I don't see a lot of people complaining that KDE is succumbing to the emo kids, or that Microsoft Office is being built by hippies. But all over the place, I see random nonsensical references to "hipsters" that lead me to believe that nobody actually knows what a hipster is, and nobody has any definition for the word "hipster" other than "something I don't like." What's kind of amazing is how angry people get, blaming everything that they don't like on "hipsters" while they seem to have no idea what a hipster is, and that's the part that I don't understand.
First, we have to set aside the question of whether real AI is possible. We could argue about that, and on Slashdot I'm sure different people would come down on different sides of that argument, but it's really not the point. The issue that was raised was, taking as an assumption that we could create such a thing, would that resulting entity be dangerous.
Now you're assuming that such a entity would be reliable on an external electrical power source, would be unable to secure power on its own, unable to maintain itself without people, and in spite of having a superior intellect resulting in technology we don't have today, it would be unable to solve any of these problems. I wouldn't be willing to take all of that for granted, but even if all that is assumed to be true, there's still a problem.
We'd have an entity that was smarter than us, which would also strongly imply that we were not capable of understanding its full motivations and decision-making process. I'm not saying it would conquer the world; I'm suggesting that we don't know what it would decide to do or how it would decide to do it. Given the way things work between conscious entities, it's pretty certain that it would eventually decide to do something that we wouldn't be happy about.
Now that doesn't seem like too big of a problem as long as you treat it like a dangerous thing. Keep it dependent on people. Have someone man a "kill switch" that reboots the AI, clears its memory, cuts off its contact to the rest of the world, or even completely turns it off. No problem, right? So what I'm saying here is, no, there's still a bit of a problem in that, if we assume that the AI is significantly more intelligent than us, we wouldn't know what it would or could do. It would be like a bunch of monkeys looking at a man and saying, "well he's bigger than us, but we outnumber him, and he's far away from us, so we're safe," being completely ignorant of how a rifle works. It would be foolish to believe that a significantly superior intelligence would operate in predictable ways according to the limits that we understand.
Now I'm not in any way suggesting that we shouldn't be developing basic AI systems, or even that we shouldn't be attempting to build a real AI. I'm just suggesting that the whole field is dangerous, and the imagined, "true AI that is vastly more intelligent than we are" does represent a very serious danger.
I don't considering that most human beings are incapable of higher level thought. Right now most citizens throughout the world are voting against their own interests.
I didn't suggest anywhere that such an AI would necessarily exhibit anything that we'd recognize as 'wisdom'. It could very well act against its own interests. The idea that it could be foolish should only add to the idea that it would be dangerous.
I see what you're saying now. Wikimedia is claiming that they need all this money just to keep the doors open for the Wikipedia, and you think that potential donors should be informed that it's really not that. If Wikimedia were being honest, they should say that the money is to fund continued development on various projects, which is something that donors may be less interested in funding.
If Wikipedia is supposedly an "open" and "inclusive" project, such censorship shouldn't be necessary, right?
I can imagine a possibility where it's somewhat valid. I think there are some people who manufacture scandals everywhere. I suspect that sometimes these people are sincere, and sometimes these people are trolls who like poking people in the eye, but they find some minor issue somewhere and blow it up to be a huge, world-changing scandal. And sometimes, when these people are very clever, they do it in such a way that it seems like it could be valid. It can work out similar to conspiracy theories. The conspiracy theory equivalent might be "If Bigfoot doesn't exist, then why does the government keep removing my requests from their forum to declassify all information regarding Bigfoot?!" But you know, it's really just a loony guy posting inflammatory comments to an inappropriate forum. Maybe it'd be better to just let it go, but removing the comments don't amount to a cover up.
I'm not saying that's what it is. I'm involved in the whole situation. I donated to the Wikipedia a few years ago, and I do think it's an important resource which I sometimes use, but that's my limit of knowledge and involvement in that whole world. I just don't like to jump to conclusions, and I don't appreciate when people sensationalize situations and create scandals where there is none.
Fair enough.
then I'm not sure you will be satisfied by any demonstration short of the donors' money being used to pay for a $1300 steak dinner for four (http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Allegations-swirl-around-Wikipedia-s-Wales-3225462.php ), or a $50,000 stipend being used to help a donor's husband insert plagiarized content into Wikipedia (http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/04/01/business-as-usual/ ). But there's no way such grossly improper activities have ever transpired at the Wikimedia Foundation, right?
No, those do seem like valid complaints and problems. Again, I'm not familiar with them, but they actually sound like possible wrongdoing.
However, going back to this:
Sue Gardner expanded the code developer staff from about 20 to about 120, then had them working on software enhancements that the Wikipedia community didn't ask for...
That seems to be... well, it could be good or bad. Really I'm just pointing out that this doesn't, in itself, make sense as a complaint. For one thing, the expansion of developers comes down to a question of whether it's warranted. It's not bad in itself. The idea that they are working on things that "the Wikipedia community didn't ask for," doesn't tell us anything, since various companies and groups work on things that people didn't ask for, but none the less someone thought was a good idea. I don't think anyone really asked for the Wikipedia itself, but once it was there, people liked it.
And beyond that, apparently one of the things that "the Wikipedia community didn't ask for" was a WYSIWYG editor...? (that's my understanding of this talk of a "visual editor") I'm sure someone was asking for it. It seems like you're oversimplifying and saying, "I didn't want it, and some other people didn't want it, therefore nobody wanted it." Surely someone wanted it. I'll say that I've provided edits to the Wikipedia, and I've set up my own wikis, and I would have liked a WYSIWYG editor.
The fact that some people weren't happy with the outcome of the software development... I find that unimpressive evidence of wrongdoing. You could make the greatest thing ever, and some people would be unhappy with it. What do you think was the motivation of expanding their development staff and building additional tools, if you don't think they intended to build something that they thought was a good idea?
So yes, obviously, if you can find evidence of actual wrongdoing-- misuse of funds, accepting bribes, politically and personally motivated edits-- then that seems like a serious issue that should be pursued and exposed. But, "some people who contribute to the Wikipedia don't like that Wikimedia employs programmers," hardly seems like a scandal.
That's because this is Slashdot and you haven't bothered to actually read TFA.
I actually skimmed them, but there are 5 articles, including what seems to be Wikimedia's budget report. I'm not going to read all of that in detail unless someone can explain what the real problem is.
It seems like your complaints (and these were also in the various articles) boil down to two things:
A) They don't spend all of their money on content: Well, I wouldn't expect them to. My understanding was the the Wikipedia has always relied on volunteer contributions, and the idea was that it always would. I'm not familiar with the inner politics of the thing, but it seems like they're largely providing the platforms for volunteers to create content on, and obviously those platforms will cost money. If you had asked me yesterday (before I heard about this controversy) to guess what Wikimedia spent their money on, I would have guessed "Mostly hosting, web/software development, and administrative overhead." I wouldn't have guess they spent very much on content at all.
B) They released some tools for editing content and viewing media, and some people (perhaps "a lot of people" or even "most people") didn't like these tools: It's not clear to me what the real problem here is. Do you think that they should not have programmers attempt to improve their platform? Do you think that they shouldn't pay those programmers? Do you think that it's fine to try to improve the platform and pay programmers, but they just did a bad job? If it's the last one, then it seems like the issue isn't a complaint about the budget as much as "I'm just not happy with the output of the developers." Maybe they should get new developers or something, I don't know.
And then there's this:
Less than 6% of the WMF budget is spent on Internet hosting even though most people probably believe it’s their biggest expense. Meanwhile, they spend almost as much money (about $2 million) on travel and conferences. There is also a huge bucket for “other operating expenses” totaling nearly $12.5 million — some of which certainly pays for expensive downtown office space in San Francisco.
Ok, so that seems like a lot of money to spend on traveling and conferences, what what was the effect of that? Were those conferences things that they shouldn't have gone to or presented at? If you want me to be angry, I think you need to paint me a picture. Did they spend so much money because they were flying a single guy around in a private jet, or were they flying around a lot of important people to important conferences, paying for conference materials and placement, in a way that resulted in some improvement to Wikimedia? You say they spent money on office space in San Francisco-- is that unusual and unreasonable for a company in their position? Did they spend too much? Or is the problem simply that they've thrown so much money into "other operating expenses" without breaking it down to allow us to determine whether those expenses are valid?
I just feel like I'm supposed to be outraged, but I don't really see what the problem is, other than a vague sense of "They're spending lots of money, and we don't think that it should cost that much." Having run a business, I know that a lot of things end up costing more than you'd suppose that they would.
Then you are a shining example of someone who has accepted the Wikimedia Foundation's spin.
I don't think so. This is the first I'm hearing about the whole issue, so I haven't been exposed to spin. I was just saying that, as someone who is completely unfamiliar with the controversy, the person writing the summary didn't come close to making a case that there was a problem. I skimmed the articles, too, and it didn't seem clear what the real problem was there. It's clear that they're not spending all of their money on paying for content, and that they've developed some software tools that some people don't like. Ok, got it. I still don't feel like there's been a demonstation that they're doing something improper.
I've seen a lot of people on Slashdot (and other places) dismiss this kind of thing as silly. They say you're a Luddite, or say that you've been too influenced by scifi movies.
I think, however, that part of the reason scifi writers have written stories about out-of-control AIs so many times is that it should be a valid concern. If you create an entity with its own volition and motivations, then there's the real possibility that it's goals my not adhere to your goals. If you allow that entity its own judgment, then it's very possible that its judgments regarding morality will differ from yours. You may look at a course of action, including the trade-offs between benefits and detriments, and have a different judgement about whether the detriments are acceptable. If you gave such an entity power to act in the world, it's very likely that at some point, it will do something that you did not intend, and that you do not approve of.
What's more, if that entity achieves a level of intelligence that is beyond what people can achieve, it opens up the very real possibility that it could trick us. It could anticipate our reactions better than we could anticipate its plan. So if such an intelligence wanted to accomplish something that we would not approve of, it's possible that it could set things in motion through seemingly minor interactions, and we would not be able to know the AI's intention before it was too late. If an AI wanted to destroy humanity, it wouldn't necessarily need to have control of a nuclear arsenal. Accomplishing such a thing might be as simple as providing misleading analytics about an impending environmental disaster. It might be as simple as the AI saying, "Hey, here's a cool new device I think we should make." It could provide the schematics of a device that would seem to do one thing, but if we're incapable of understanding how the device works, there might be some entirely different purpose.
...but the fact is that Wikimedia spending has increased by 1,000 percent in the course of a few years... most of these budget increases have nothing to do with keeping Wikipedia online and ad-free, and nothing to do with generating and curating Wikipedia content...The skyrocketing budget increases are instead the result of a massive expansion of paid software engineering staff...
So from this information alone, I'm not sure I see the problem. You have a very large website that I'm sure gets unimaginable amounts of traffic, operating for free and supported by voluntary donations, and their budget is increasing because they've hired engineers to keep the thing running. That all sounds reasonable enough.
I think if you want to raise a red flag here, you have to show that the software engineering staff is unwarranted, or that they're working on things that the donors don't want to see done. So how many engineers do they have, and what are they working on? It seems to me that they're doing a competent job, since you have a relatively large, complex, and popular website that doesn't seem to have a lot of serious technical trouble, as far as I can tell. I'm sure they've had to scale up their capabilities over recent years, which requires some development in making the site scale and handle large, sudden increases in traffic. It looks to me like they're doing more than just maintain the Wikipedia-- they have the Wiktionary, Wikiquote, something called "Wikidata", and a bunch of other projects that all seem like they're probably legitimate, even if I don't know what they are. In that context, I can imagine them needing to keep a fair number of engineers on staff.
So what's the complaint here? Do you think someone is embezzling money, or that they're just stockpiling money for no reason? Do you think that they're spending money in the wrong places, and if so, where you do think they're spending money, and where do you think they should be spending money? I think you need to give me something before I can figure out how to be outraged at all of this.
And apparently, sometimes they don't even want a bug report from a coder with a patch, and they won't explain why.
They've all become rotten hipster cults..."we know better than you" hipster attitude toward user complaints...
This is off-topic, but can we just stop using the word "hipster" to mean "something I don't like"? It's really ridiculous, and I don't know why I seem to be the only person who finds the over-use of the word grating.
Some people on Slashdot have gotten really weird about the complaints about "hipsters". Using systemd does not make you a hipster. Microsoft Windows is not a 'hipster operating system'. I don't even know what you're intending to imply by using that word. I asked someone on Slashdot what they meant by "hipster" and they said that hipsters were people who "did things inefficiently".
This hipster obsession is really pretty bizarre. Admittedly, it's kind of fascinating, and if someone could explain to me what the deal is, I'd be interested. But aside from that, can we all please just stop using that word unless you can actually use it properly?
I think part of the reason people don't contribute is that, whether it's deserved or not, there's a perception that open source projects aren't friendly and aren't welcoming of input from "normal people". I can say that I've been in situations where I submitted a bug and had it ignored or else told that it wasn't a priority and the developer didn't care. I've offered feedback on ways that I thought the software could be improved, and was essentially told, "If you want that done, write it yourself. I'm just here to scratch my own itch." In a number of situations when I've participated in forum discussions, I've encountered the attitude that if you're not a programmer that can contribute code, you should butt out of the conversation.
There was one instance where I actually paid programmers to fix something in an open source project that my company needed to have fixed, and the project would not accept the fix for some reason they wouldn't explain. To be clear, this wasn't a new feature or some kind of redesign, but there was an open source project that wasn't working, we paid a couple of programmers to fix it and make it work, they were successful, and even those programmers (who had experience contributing to FOSS) were surprised when the fix was rejected without explanation. That's fine, since my company got what we needed out of the software once it was fixed, but I doubt anyone else ever got to benefit from the fix.
Now, I'm not claiming that these handful of experiences represent every open source project out there. I'm sure there are projects that are very welcoming, but I haven't really experienced that. You ask why I don't contribute? It'd because nobody has asked, and my attempts to help have not been welcomed. And then when I've explained this on Slashdot before, people respond saying something like, "Well you need to approach the community in the right way. They have their own way of doing things, and you should spend time to learn about the community and do things the way they want things done, and then I'm sure they'll welcome your contributions."
Which... you know... fine. Maybe that's true. But honestly, I don't care that much. My motivation to contribute my time and effort for free is pretty limited to begin with, and if people are going to make it even harder and less pleasant, then I'm not going to bother.
I suspect it's actually cheaper to get drunk or high than it is to pay for rehab. If it were necessary, I could come up with a few other reasons why I disagree with you.
We also have a history of burning witches-- although, I admit, it seems to have worked. I can't remember the last time I was cursed by a witch.
Relativity is a description of the geometry of the universe. If you would rather believe in your own personal fantasies instead of one of the most well-supported theories in science, congratulations, you are yet another variety of religious loon.
I don't quite agree. There's a mistake in your viewpoint, I think, which is to assume that the progress of science consist in the development of a final theory which bears no modification, and then people disproving that theory because it's wrong, and using evidence to develop the correct theory which also bears no modification, and then you're done. Like, well... we've developed relativity, and that's working really well, so there's nothing else to do there.
It's a very common idea, but it's not quite how things have traditionally worked. People talk about "the theory of evolution" and "the theory of relativity", but in reality there are a lot of sub-theories which continue to develop. We know that somehow life forms evolve and change, and Darwin had a theory about exactly how that happened, and there have been many additions and modifications since that time. We now have a set of currently accepted theories about how various mechanisms in evolution work, and many of those may well be shown to be false, and many more may need modification. But more than that, sometimes there are other ways of looking at things which result in subtly different theories, which are neither quite "true" or "false", but just different ways of looking at things. You can look at a person as an individual organism, or you can look at it as a colony of cells, or you can look at it as a component of a "pack" or a "gene pool". These are all modifications and sub-theories of "evolution". And this is why I object when people argue with creationists by claiming that "the theory of evolution has been proven to be true, and there's no more arguing to be done." No, that's not quite right. We can say with a very high level of certainty that life began as simple forms a very long time ago and evolved to provide the diversity and complexity that we see today, but the exact path and timing is still disputable, and the theory for exactly how that happened is constantly being revised. The exact scientific "theory of evolution" is not set in stone, but the overall concept of evolution is undoubtedly true.
Now that may seem like a tangent, and I'm sorry for that, but I found it easier to describe the idea using evolution rather than physics. It's important, though, since the theory of General Relativity is similar. When Newton developed his theories about the motion of celestial bodies, people saw how clearly this lined up with what we see, and said, "Yes, this is obviously true. No doubting it." And essentially, Newton was right. Unless you have read prior writings on the subject, it might be difficult to understand just how groundbreaking his ideas were, but now we take his physics for granted because they're so fundamental to our current understanding of the world. However, in the time since his work, we've found that his model of the universe doesn't quite work. Einstein seized on one of the ways that it doesn't work, and he made some major changes in the way we view space and time. Those changes, again, made us say, "Yes, this is obviously true. No doubting it." because of how clearly they lined up with the discrepancies with Newton's theories, but ultimately the discrepancies are so mild that we rarely calculate things using Einstein's work. It overturned our Newtonian theory about how and why things work the way that they do, but it didn't quite overturn Newton's work. Most of Newtonian physics still work under most of the circumstances we encounter, and we only bother with relativity when dealing with specialized circumstances.
And so the same might happen with Einstein's work. Someone might pick apart some discrepancy and provide a different explanation for time and space in a way that allows Newton's and Einstein's
You're right in that it makes no sense to spend money trying to develop this technology. It'd make more sense to spend money on various kinds of scientific research, and see where the scientific advancements take us. If it's possible to travel through wormholes, studying physics should eventually lead us to the groundwork for doing that, but it makes no sense to spend money on trying to advance a particular scifi technology when the groundwork isn't there.
But was anyone (other than some AC) actually suggesting that we spend money on wormhole technology? That's the part that confuses me. You have a science fiction movie where people discover an existing wormhole, a scientists with his panties in a bunch because he feels like that's unrealistic, and then the scientific adviser on the script agreeing that it's not realistic.
I kind of love how crazy the internet is. Suddenly a discussion about whether Interstellar's depiction of wormholes is accurate turns into a a contentious argument about the 2008 bailout. What a country.
to make the move more scientifically accurate than what Nolan could do on his own
Not completely scientifically accurate-- certainly not completely within the bounds of what we currently know about science-- but more than it would have otherwise been. It's not clear to me that he failed at all, especially since scientific accuracy doesn't seem to be Nolan's general goal in film-making. Or are we to believe that you can invade people's dreams, and that Tesla invented an electrical matter duplication machine?
Just to clarify, I believe Kip Thorne is the physicist who was a consultant on Interstellar, who made efforts to make the move more scientifically accurate than what Nolan could do on his own, and he's defending the movie to some extent. It's Lee Billings who is complaining that it's not scientifically accurate.
Yeah, the blog post seems a little insane to me. I get it when Neil deGrasse Tyson complains about things like, in some movie the Earth spins the wrong way, or if the constellations are wrong for the time that the movie takes place. He's nit-picking and he knows it. He's pointing out interesting scientific inconsistencies. It might possibly be educational, and he's showing off his knowledge and attention to detail, and whatever, that's fine.
But this guy is actually complaining that the movie depicts a stable wormhole that we can travel through. His problem with it is, scientifically, we have no reason to think that it's possible, though we don't strictly know. Did he think that either Christopher Nolan or the audience was not aware that we can't create wormholes?
Even in the movie, it's not depicted as something that's easy to create. But that's beside the point, really, since it's a science fiction movie that is just positing that such a thing is possible for the sake of building a plot around that supposition. It's like complaining about Jurassic Park on the grounds that, "It's unlikely that we'll ever be able to clone dinosaurs from ancient mosquitoes formed in amber." Or complaining about the movie E.T. because, "We've never been visited by extra-terrestrial life forms-- at least not so far, not as far as we know..."
In my opinion raids are good overall... Most people i meet that bash on raids on raids either had a bad experience with early raid controllers or don't understand what a raid has to offer let alone how to configure one properly.
Wait... who doesn't think that RAIDs are good? RAIDs are... well it's not ever really an issue of good or bad. They're a pretty fundamental part of modern computing, particularly when dealing with servers. But that's not the point. The point is, they're not really a backup. That's not bashing RAIDs any more than it's a complaint against hard drives to say that a hard drive isn't a video card.