The primary function of government that isn't provided by self-defense in a natural setting: protection of property rights beyond subsistence assets (subsistence assets being your own land from which you live, your house, your tools and your family's human capital). Without that, where would all of Gates' assets be?
PS: Sending all of his money to Africa to alleviate "poverty" there is rather ironic since most Africans actually own subsistence-level assets. Most US citizens, the folks he depends on to fight and die protecting his property rights, and to pay taxes to pay for the government that supports the social construct of property rights, don't have those subsistence guarantees anymore. What they have now, since the GI's left the farm for the cities are jobs -- jobs that Gates can't wait to give away to people from other countries.
The primary function of government that isn't provided by self-defense in a natural setting : protection of subsistence property rights (your own land from which you live, your house, your tools and your family's human capital). Without that, where would all of Gates' assets be?
Allen's financial muscle didn't belong in the competition but rather behind as the funding for the prize itself. This is the same sort of garbage that goes on with NASA with taxpayer's money (which is what guys like Allen and Gates are really spending since they should have been taxed on their economic rent proceeds from nearly day one). The NASA managers (and Congressmen) just _love_ to pick winners. Its the failure mode of societies that let wealth accumulate while taxing others to pay for the protection of those property rights.
Microsoft's operating system is in demand not because of its high quality but because the information industry's infrastructure must use it as a standard means of communication.
This seems higly analogous to the situation where you have one electrical standard for interoperation of devices and power generators.
Gates struck deal that gave him a natural monopoly. There were other
operating systems for the 808x family around and any one of them could
have been the predominant one shipped by IBM with its PC. Any one of
them would have formed a natural monopoly on that platform and made the
owner rich.
Such monopoly profits are called "economic rent" which everyone with any sort of mental faculties about economics, including such staunch advocates
of laissez-faire capitalism [wikipedia.org], as
Milton
Friedman
recognize as the most appropriate source of tax
revenue. Since economic rent is subsidized, rather than taxed -- due to
the abandonment of the principles of Henry George
-- Gates was given state support as he imposed a
horrible operating system on the world and became its richest man as a
consequence.
Like any welfare queen -- it corrupted his character which wasn't that good to begin with.
He can't recover his character by giving away all his wealth to fashionable causes -- he's not much of a rock star anyway. He might try getting something like a replacement of income and capital gains tax with a tax on net assets passed through the wealth-owned political system -- or at the very least a tax on market capitalization.
He might also fund a technology prize or two. Why do guys like Gates, Allen and Ellison leave it up to folks like the Ansari's to do the noble thing and stop schmoozing with people as a test of their worthiness for money? Are these guys that lonely?
The story concentrates on the fate of a 32 year old woman -- telling us she is "majority owner" of an art gallery.
So, that shows there are jobs out there for Silicon Valley expatriates -- if they're 32 year old women -- or 32 year old gays. When they give you the ambiguous "retraining" line -- never telling you what skills you are supposed to learn -- this is what they're really talking about guys.
I find it fascinating that no one has brought up the 1973 slowdown in productivity growth. While everyone was excited by "The New Economy" a lot of papers got written about how productivity growth was back on track -- then reality hit: The New Economy wasn't real.
No one has really accounted for what happened in 1973 but a whole lot more than just productivity slowdown happened right around and just before that time.
For those who don't know what the anonymous "TorKlingberg" is referring to:
Two
of the three founders of the Tokamak program have come out against the
Tokamak and one of the founders circulated a letter to all of the
plasma physics labs as well as to the relevant Congressmen, stating
categorically that the Tokamak program was never real -- it was just a
vehicle for raising funding so that other more hopeful ideas could be
tried.
I scanned the original letter and presented a link to
it as an aspect of the fusion power article. This is primary source
material -- not original research -- from one of the foremost
authorities, indeed one of the fathers of the US fusion energy program.
The nothing-better-to-do-with-their-times censored it
and quite honestly I just don't have the time, energy or patience to
bother with a reversion war with the anonymous bottom feeders.
During the time I worked on this legislation with Bussard he did tell me about some of Inesco's luxurious accommodations provided by Bob Guccione's support of that fusion company. But that was privately funded and more attributable to Guccione's style than any supposed addiction to luxury suffered by Bussard. Perhaps some folks heard about some of this and mistook it for behavior during the government program.
Scientology, despite the worst fantasies of its detractors, cannot be blamed for possibly delaying progress in energy technology to the point where energy shortages may spark WW III.
Also, none of the founders of Scientology had the decency to come out later and try to stop it.
The DoE committment to very large fusion concepts (the giant magnetic
tokamak) ensures only the need for very large budgets; and that is what
the program has been about for the past 15 years - a defense-of-budget
program - not a fusion-achievement program. As one of three people who
created this program in the early 1970's (when I was an Asst. Dir. of
the AEC's Controlled Thermonuclear Reaction Division) I know this to be
true; we raised the budget in order to take 20% off the top of the
larger funding, to try all of the hopeful new things that the mainline
labs would not try.
Each of us left soon thereafter, and the second generation
management thought the big program was real; it was not. Ever since
then, the ERDA/DoE has rolled Congress to increase and/or continue
big-budget support. This worked so long as various Democratic Senators
and Congressmen could see the funding as helpful in their districts.
But fear of undermining their budget position also made DoE bureaucrats
very autocratic and resistant to any kind of new approach, whether
inside DoE or out in industry. This led DoE to fight industry wherever
a non-DoE hopful new idea appeared.
Well, actually, when we're talking about a program with funding requirements as big as the national debt its time to start talking geopolitics and comparable programs. What other geopolitical programs are being carried out with comparable sums of money?
If the US can invade Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, discover that the whole thing was a con perpetrated by the Bush administration and then stay there killing thousands American boys, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and blowing hundreds of billions of dollars a year -- why what the hell? Build a ring aound the earth for a few trillion dollars!
What's anyone gonna do about it? Shift to the Yuan as the reserve currency or something?
The only reason Java ended up dominant in enterprise web applications is that Sun pushed it in the Indian diploma mills at a time when it was fashionable among American corporate executives to stick it to American programmers who were getting close to being paid enough money to raise families in the ridiculous cost-of-living male-ghettos like Silicon Valley.
This of course, meant that Java got used for everything -- including the presentation layer of web applications where it is ridiculous. It took at over 5 years and Google's "revolutionary AJAX" to get people to start paying attention to Javascript/DHTML again.
Well, now that enough web apps have sucked down enough wages to export enough tons of gold via 747s to India, the savvy corporates are starting to realize that there is a limit to the degree they can sodomize the American programmer at the expense of their stockholders -- especially with Google being so fashionable. The jig is up.
One of the chief tasks of total quality management is the characterization of error. That's one reason why lossless compression is more valuable than lossy compression.
More importantly though is the fact that as soon as we decide to allow lossy compression we have no operational metric as to which AI is superior.
AI has been drifting without a good metric. Hutter has provided it. Actually, if they'd listened to Ockham they'd have had it but they were too busy trying to get government grants to bother thinking about what a 13th century Friar told them to do.
Are you telling me that your contest will declare gzip more intelligent than I?
Of course not. Ignoring fatigue, you can do the gzip algorithm trivially in the same order of time as a computer -- its just a scaling constant. What the machine cannot do trivially is derive the higher order constructs of natural language that humans find it relatively easy to derive. AI's are now getting close to deriving rules of grammar but they're still not there yet. There are higher order rules yet -- such as knowing that when someone classified as a "libertarian" is saying something, certain ideas are more likely to be expressed than when somenoe classified as a "communist" is saying something.... and so on.
Now, how one would set up such a competition to show humans are superior to a particular AI, as opposed to comparing AI's is a good question. If you view the competition as coming up with descriptive rules (sort of the way Cyc does with humans) of conceptual schemata then it makes sense to let humans write programs that do compression and let programs write programs that do compression. The differences in the predictive power of the models, represented by the programs, will drive the compression ratios.
Compression is a far better basis for intelligence competition than chess, the Turing test or even SAT verbal analogy tests.
Marcus Hutter's AIXI paper provides a proof that if an agent is a good model for human behavior, and the universe is computable, that the most intelligent program is the smallest program that losslessly compresses the set of observations of the universe.
I've formalized a prize competition based on this criterion as the C-Prize, modeled after the Methusela Mouse Prize. The big difference is that instead of lifespan the metric is intelligence. Here is the currently published C-Prize criteria:
Since all technology prize awards are geared toward solving crucial problems, the most crucial technology prize award of them all would be one that solves the rest of them:
The C-Prize -- A prize that solves the artificial intelligence problem.
The C-Prize award criterion is as follows:
Let anyone submit a program that produces, with no inputs, one of the
major natural language corpora as output.
S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
Compression program and decompression program are made open source.
Explanation
A very severe meta-problem with artificial intelligence is the question of how one can define the quality of an artificial intelligence.
Fortunately there is an objective technique for ranking the quality of artificial intelligence:
Kolmogorov Complexity
Kolmogorov Complexity is a mathematically precise formulation of Ockham's Razor, which basically just says "Don't over-simplify or over-complicate things." More formally, the Kolmogorov Complexity of a given bit string is the minimum size of a Turing machine program required to output, with no inputs, the given bit string.
Any set of programs which purport to be the standards of artificial intelligence can be compared by simply comparing their Artificial Intelligence Quality. Their AIQs can be precisely measured as follows:
Take an arbitrarily large corpus of writings sampled from the world wide web. This corpus will establish the equivalent of an IQ test. Give the AIs the task of compressing this corpus into the smallest representation. This representation must be a program that, taking no outside inputs, produces the exact sample it compressed. The AIQ of an AI is simply the ratio of the size of the uncompressed writings to the size of the program that, when executed, produces the uncompressed writings.
In other words, the AIQ is the compression ratio achieved by the AI on the AIQ test.
The reason this works as an AI quality test is that compression requires predictive modeling. If you can predict what someone is going to say, you have modeled their mental processes and by inference have a superset of their mental faculties.
Mechanics
The C-Prize is to be modeled after the Methusela Mouse Prize or M-Prize where people make pledges of money to the prize fund. If you would like to help with the set up and/or administration of this prize award similar to the M-Prize let me know by email.
Cost is part of the calculation, Mr. Moffat noted, but typically not the most important consideration. "People who say this is simply labor arbitrage don't get it," he said. "It's mostly about skills."
Are we talking about the skills that it takes to head the entire information industry off in bogus directions like putting the presentation layer of web applications on the server where it doesn't belong just so you can continue hiring more programmers trained in Java by third-world diploma mills?
It shouldn't have taken GoogleMaps to shake the industry out of its worship of zombie legions trained in the latest Java library.
No, Mr. Moffat, what is going on is wealth centralization pure and simple. India is better adapted to play this game than the US because the US is, well, was a country that hadn't gotten around to making its middle class subsist outside the cash economy. Or perhaps I should say India hadn't gotten around to making its agrarian clan-based society give up its subsistence culture for grocery-stores and mortgage debt as prerequisite to reproduction if not bare survival.
Aside from the fact that it is big news anytime the Federal government forgoes a chance to wrest power from localities, this particular ruling has subtle but profound geopolitical ramifications:
There is a fundamental tension in geopolitics between two competing principles: Self-determination vs territorial integrity. Recent geopolitical fashion, driven largely by the US Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, has subordinated self-determination to territorial integrity. Specifically, territorial boundaries may not be changed in service of self-determination of minority groups or even majority groups. Self-determination has been limited to mean the ability of residents of a territory, whatever their background, beliefs or preferences, to impose their will on other residents of that territory. To address the objection that this results in tyranny, a long, ambiguous and, in practice, selectively enforced list of "human rights" has been declared by the United Nations -- rights that are supposed to prevent tyranny. Part of the rhetoric for this sort of territorial integrity is the prevention of forced migrations.
By allowing eminent domain compensation to eject residents from their homes in service of other private uses, Kelo et al v. City of New London states that civil authorities may find it necessary to force the migration, with just compensation, of some of their private citizens, for the benefit of other private citizens, so long as the greater public good is served.
This SCOTUS decision takes the stance that territorial integrity can be violated for the "public good" even if the development thereby enabled is a private one. There is just one thing between this decision and a dramatic geopolitical revolution allowing people to create societies with others of like mind for their own living experiments:
The Sections 1981 and 1982 of the Civil Rights Act of 1870.
As Frank Salter points out in "On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethny and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration", mass migration has put all territories "in play" world-wide. Key to this has been a perverse notion, largely arising from the 1960s reinterpretation of Section 1982 of the Civil Rights Act of 1870. That reinterpretation, spread throughout the world via the US's dominant position during the era, is that the right of central governance to over-ride local governance and even individual, private freedom of association, extends to anything that might remind one of the institution of slavery. Such reminders are called "badges... of slavery". Never mind that when you violate private preferences for personal association you have created a new form of slavery. Apparently, the over-riding governmental interest since the 1960s has been to keep all rights, public and private, territorial and contractual (see Section 1981), "in play" between all ethnies worldwide.
When people realize how much property value is being destroyed by the misguided notion that all people everywhere should be forced to live the multicultural experiment of some misguided 60s idealists and greedy 21st century globalists -- multiculturalist supremacism -- it will become apparent that eminent domain compensation as a means of allowing new territorial boundaries to form is not the slippery slope to Armageddon but rather the path away from it, to true diversity and to the stars.
The main reason the government continues to support NASA is the technologists of the country could, if they so decided, bring down the government overnight -- and would most likely do so if they didn't think they get something for all the taxes they pay. NASA doesn't need to deliver anything but an appearance of trying to accomplish wonderful things under the constraints of a tight budget imposed by an unsympathetic Congress. Since this is precisely the sort of thing that politicians posing as scientists etc., can accomplish (as opposed to say, actually lowering the cost of access to low earth orbit) this is precisely what the government delivers decade after decade.
I read somewhere that cranial capcity varied among ethnic groups quite a bit but that ethnic Hawaiians had the largest cranial capacity of any ethnic group.
Wouldn't it be rather fascinating to see what they did with their own country?
PS: I happen to think that self-determination (mutually consenting adults forming their own states with territorial claim via eminent domain-driven migration as practical mechanism) is the fundamental human right upon which all other human rights are founded and that territorial integrity and democracy are secondary considerations. Large cranial capacity shouldn't be a prerequisite for human rights. But it would be particularly rational for supporters of the principle of human rights to give priority to Hawaiian self-determination since they are particularly endangered by outbreeding and displacement and are obviously a unique ethny.
Well I noticed that Dave Brody stuck mention of space habitats at the end of the article after a whole lot of worthless back and forth so I suppose I owe him something of an apology -- but really -- doesn't he know how far out to lunch the debate has gotten since Zubrin hit the public relations mill? Why bury the ultimate solution when it is already so buried?
Reading about a debate between terraformers and "don't touch that" Luddites is sort of like watching "Democrats" and "Republicans" on CSPAN: They're setting the range of opinion to exclude the founders of their institution.
Ad Astra was originally a space settlement magazine when the L5 Society merged with the National Space Society on condition that the emphasis on space settlement remain its ultimate priority.
What is the difference between a space settlement and a terraformed planet, you might ask?
The fact that you need to ask is evidence that the foundation of the National Space Society was long ago abrogated for more "fashionable" pursuits, such as those promoted by hucksters like Zubrin.
Since the Ad Astrans have had the unmitigated chutzpah to quote the originator of the space settlement idea without talking about actual space settlement -- pretending the idea simply doesn't exist, I'm going to provide an appropriate rebuttal: The entirety of Mr. Combs' FAQ.
What is space settlement?
Space settlement is the concept of colonizing space by using extraterrestrial
resources to construct artificial, closed-ecology habitats in orbit.
What is a space habitat?
A space habitat would be a pressurized sphere, cylinder, or torus (donut
shape), rotating on its axis so that centrifugal force serves as an artificial
gravity. The interior is landscaped with soil, water, and vegetation. Sunlight
would be gathered by mirrors and reflected into the interior of the habitat
through windows. The goal is to create as Earth-like an environment as possible.
How is space settlement different from any
of the other space colonization proposals?
Most thinking regarding human expansion into space has focused on the settling
of the surfaces of other planets, sometimes after modifying their environments
to make them more Earth-like (called terraforming). The space settlement
concept maintains that planets are not the most ideal location for human
colonies beyond the Earth.
Aren't we going to terraform Mars or Venus?
Terraforming is a long-term project requiring technology significantly advanced
over what we have today. Even terraforming advocates admit it would take
a minimum of 200 years to modify Mars to the stage where even simple anaerobic
microorganisms and algae can survive. [Ref: Terraforming: Engineering Planetary
Environments, Martyn J. Fogg, SAE Press 1995.] Space habitats, on the other
hand, can be built with today's technology, and would be homes in space which
people initiating the program could move into within their lifetimes.
Interstellar travel may someday become possible, but we have no guarantee
that Earth-like planets will be as plentiful in the Milky Way galaxy as they
have been in Hollywood, CA.
What advantages would orbital settlements have
over a colony built on another planet?
Access to 24-hour-a-day sunlight. This makes solar power a consistent,
economical energy source. Photovoltaic panels can convert sunlight into
electrical current, and solar mirrors can concentrate it for process heat
in industrial operations (such as the smelting of ore). A space-based solar
concentrator the size of a football field (which could still weigh less than
a car) could provide process heat equivalent to the burning of 1 million
barrels of oil over 30 years.
Sunlight also drives the life-support system of the habitat, so the day/night
cycle can be set to whatever is convenient. Compare this to the moon, where
there is 14 days of continuous daylight, and then a 14-day-long night. Here,
some alternate energy source would probably have to be used half the time.
Access to zero gravity. Th
Re:Slashdot Commies Oppose Private Lunar Missions?
on
Back to Moon in 2015?
·
· Score: 1
Wait, aren't you forgetting the greatest legacy of all? The failure to pass along their values (not to mention real estate equity and job security) resulting in the failure of the boomers to have viable families which resulted in the largest demographic collapse the west has ever experienced -- a population implosion that justified the opening of the borders to illegal immigrants "seeking a better life for their families".
Slashdot Mirror
PS: Sending all of his money to Africa to alleviate "poverty" there is rather ironic since most Africans actually own subsistence-level assets. Most US citizens, the folks he depends on to fight and die protecting his property rights, and to pay taxes to pay for the government that supports the social construct of property rights, don't have those subsistence guarantees anymore. What they have now, since the GI's left the farm for the cities are jobs -- jobs that Gates can't wait to give away to people from other countries.
Obviously that should have read "property rights beyond subsistence".
The primary function of government that isn't provided by self-defense in a natural setting : protection of subsistence property rights (your own land from which you live, your house, your tools and your family's human capital). Without that, where would all of Gates' assets be?
Allen's financial muscle didn't belong in the competition but rather behind as the funding for the prize itself. This is the same sort of garbage that goes on with NASA with taxpayer's money (which is what guys like Allen and Gates are really spending since they should have been taxed on their economic rent proceeds from nearly day one). The NASA managers (and Congressmen) just _love_ to pick winners. Its the failure mode of societies that let wealth accumulate while taxing others to pay for the protection of those property rights.
This seems higly analogous to the situation where you have one electrical standard for interoperation of devices and power generators.
Gates struck deal that gave him a natural monopoly. There were other operating systems for the 808x family around and any one of them could have been the predominant one shipped by IBM with its PC. Any one of them would have formed a natural monopoly on that platform and made the owner rich.
Such monopoly profits are called "economic rent" which everyone with any sort of mental faculties about economics, including such staunch advocates of laissez-faire capitalism [wikipedia.org], as Milton Friedman recognize as the most appropriate source of tax revenue. Since economic rent is subsidized, rather than taxed -- due to the abandonment of the principles of Henry George -- Gates was given state support as he imposed a horrible operating system on the world and became its richest man as a consequence.
Like any welfare queen -- it corrupted his character which wasn't that good to begin with.
He can't recover his character by giving away all his wealth to fashionable causes -- he's not much of a rock star anyway. He might try getting something like a replacement of income and capital gains tax with a tax on net assets passed through the wealth-owned political system -- or at the very least a tax on market capitalization.
He might also fund a technology prize or two. Why do guys like Gates, Allen and Ellison leave it up to folks like the Ansari's to do the noble thing and stop schmoozing with people as a test of their worthiness for money? Are these guys that lonely?
So, that shows there are jobs out there for Silicon Valley expatriates -- if they're 32 year old women -- or 32 year old gays. When they give you the ambiguous "retraining" line -- never telling you what skills you are supposed to learn -- this is what they're really talking about guys.
No one has really accounted for what happened in 1973 but a whole lot more than just productivity slowdown happened right around and just before that time.
Two of the three founders of the Tokamak program have come out against the Tokamak and one of the founders circulated a letter to all of the plasma physics labs as well as to the relevant Congressmen, stating categorically that the Tokamak program was never real -- it was just a vehicle for raising funding so that other more hopeful ideas could be tried.
I scanned the original letter and presented a link to it as an aspect of the fusion power article. This is primary source material -- not original research -- from one of the foremost authorities, indeed one of the fathers of the US fusion energy program. The nothing-better-to-do-with-their-times censored it and quite honestly I just don't have the time, energy or patience to bother with a reversion war with the anonymous bottom feeders.
During the time I worked on this legislation with Bussard he did tell me about some of Inesco's luxurious accommodations provided by Bob Guccione's support of that fusion company. But that was privately funded and more attributable to Guccione's style than any supposed addiction to luxury suffered by Bussard. Perhaps some folks heard about some of this and mistook it for behavior during the government program.
Also, none of the founders of Scientology had the decency to come out later and try to stop it.
Well, actually, when we're talking about a program with funding requirements as big as the national debt its time to start talking geopolitics and comparable programs. What other geopolitical programs are being carried out with comparable sums of money?
What's anyone gonna do about it? Shift to the Yuan as the reserve currency or something?
This of course, meant that Java got used for everything -- including the presentation layer of web applications where it is ridiculous. It took at over 5 years and Google's "revolutionary AJAX" to get people to start paying attention to Javascript/DHTML again.
Well, now that enough web apps have sucked down enough wages to export enough tons of gold via 747s to India, the savvy corporates are starting to realize that there is a limit to the degree they can sodomize the American programmer at the expense of their stockholders -- especially with Google being so fashionable. The jig is up.
More importantly though is the fact that as soon as we decide to allow lossy compression we have no operational metric as to which AI is superior.
AI has been drifting without a good metric. Hutter has provided it. Actually, if they'd listened to Ockham they'd have had it but they were too busy trying to get government grants to bother thinking about what a 13th century Friar told them to do.
Of course not. Ignoring fatigue, you can do the gzip algorithm trivially in the same order of time as a computer -- its just a scaling constant. What the machine cannot do trivially is derive the higher order constructs of natural language that humans find it relatively easy to derive. AI's are now getting close to deriving rules of grammar but they're still not there yet. There are higher order rules yet -- such as knowing that when someone classified as a "libertarian" is saying something, certain ideas are more likely to be expressed than when somenoe classified as a "communist" is saying something.... and so on.
Now, how one would set up such a competition to show humans are superior to a particular AI, as opposed to comparing AI's is a good question. If you view the competition as coming up with descriptive rules (sort of the way Cyc does with humans) of conceptual schemata then it makes sense to let humans write programs that do compression and let programs write programs that do compression. The differences in the predictive power of the models, represented by the programs, will drive the compression ratios.
Practically speaking this is an assumption that any computing application makes about the universe it modeling.
Marcus Hutter's AIXI paper provides a proof that if an agent is a good model for human behavior, and the universe is computable, that the most intelligent program is the smallest program that losslessly compresses the set of observations of the universe.
I've formalized a prize competition based on this criterion as the C-Prize, modeled after the Methusela Mouse Prize. The big difference is that instead of lifespan the metric is intelligence. Here is the currently published C-Prize criteria:
Since all technology prize awards are geared toward solving crucial problems, the most crucial technology prize award of them all would be one that solves the rest of them:
The C-Prize -- A prize that solves the artificial intelligence problem.
The C-Prize award criterion is as follows:
Let anyone submit a program that produces, with no inputs, one of the major natural language corpora as output.
S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
Compression program and decompression program are made open source.
Explanation A very severe meta-problem with artificial intelligence is the question of how one can define the quality of an artificial intelligence.
Fortunately there is an objective technique for ranking the quality of artificial intelligence:
Kolmogorov Complexity
Kolmogorov Complexity is a mathematically precise formulation of Ockham's Razor, which basically just says "Don't over-simplify or over-complicate things." More formally, the Kolmogorov Complexity of a given bit string is the minimum size of a Turing machine program required to output, with no inputs, the given bit string.
Any set of programs which purport to be the standards of artificial intelligence can be compared by simply comparing their Artificial Intelligence Quality. Their AIQs can be precisely measured as follows:
Take an arbitrarily large corpus of writings sampled from the world wide web. This corpus will establish the equivalent of an IQ test. Give the AIs the task of compressing this corpus into the smallest representation. This representation must be a program that, taking no outside inputs, produces the exact sample it compressed. The AIQ of an AI is simply the ratio of the size of the uncompressed writings to the size of the program that, when executed, produces the uncompressed writings.
In other words, the AIQ is the compression ratio achieved by the AI on the AIQ test.
The reason this works as an AI quality test is that compression requires predictive modeling. If you can predict what someone is going to say, you have modeled their mental processes and by inference have a superset of their mental faculties.
Mechanics The C-Prize is to be modeled after the Methusela Mouse Prize or M-Prize where people make pledges of money to the prize fund. If you would like to help with the set up and/or administration of this prize award similar to the M-Prize let me know by email.
Are we talking about the skills that it takes to head the entire information industry off in bogus directions like putting the presentation layer of web applications on the server where it doesn't belong just so you can continue hiring more programmers trained in Java by third-world diploma mills?
It shouldn't have taken GoogleMaps to shake the industry out of its worship of zombie legions trained in the latest Java library.
No, Mr. Moffat, what is going on is wealth centralization pure and simple. India is better adapted to play this game than the US because the US is, well, was a country that hadn't gotten around to making its middle class subsist outside the cash economy. Or perhaps I should say India hadn't gotten around to making its agrarian clan-based society give up its subsistence culture for grocery-stores and mortgage debt as prerequisite to reproduction if not bare survival.
There is a fundamental tension in geopolitics between two competing principles: Self-determination vs territorial integrity. Recent geopolitical fashion, driven largely by the US Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, has subordinated self-determination to territorial integrity. Specifically, territorial boundaries may not be changed in service of self-determination of minority groups or even majority groups. Self-determination has been limited to mean the ability of residents of a territory, whatever their background, beliefs or preferences, to impose their will on other residents of that territory. To address the objection that this results in tyranny, a long, ambiguous and, in practice, selectively enforced list of "human rights" has been declared by the United Nations -- rights that are supposed to prevent tyranny. Part of the rhetoric for this sort of territorial integrity is the prevention of forced migrations.
By allowing eminent domain compensation to eject residents from their homes in service of other private uses, Kelo et al v. City of New London states that civil authorities may find it necessary to force the migration, with just compensation, of some of their private citizens, for the benefit of other private citizens, so long as the greater public good is served.
This SCOTUS decision takes the stance that territorial integrity can be violated for the "public good" even if the development thereby enabled is a private one. There is just one thing between this decision and a dramatic geopolitical revolution allowing people to create societies with others of like mind for their own living experiments:
The Sections 1981 and 1982 of the Civil Rights Act of 1870.
As Frank Salter points out in "On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethny and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration", mass migration has put all territories "in play" world-wide. Key to this has been a perverse notion, largely arising from the 1960s reinterpretation of Section 1982 of the Civil Rights Act of 1870. That reinterpretation, spread throughout the world via the US's dominant position during the era, is that the right of central governance to over-ride local governance and even individual, private freedom of association, extends to anything that might remind one of the institution of slavery. Such reminders are called "badges... of slavery". Never mind that when you violate private preferences for personal association you have created a new form of slavery. Apparently, the over-riding governmental interest since the 1960s has been to keep all rights, public and private, territorial and contractual (see Section 1981), "in play" between all ethnies worldwide.
When people realize how much property value is being destroyed by the misguided notion that all people everywhere should be forced to live the multicultural experiment of some misguided 60s idealists and greedy 21st century globalists -- multiculturalist supremacism -- it will become apparent that eminent domain compensation as a means of allowing new territorial boundaries to form is not the slippery slope to Armageddon but rather the path away from it, to true diversity and to the stars.
POOR POOR NASA!!!!
They're after their own government and territory.
Wouldn't it be rather fascinating to see what they did with their own country?
PS: I happen to think that self-determination (mutually consenting adults forming their own states with territorial claim via eminent domain-driven migration as practical mechanism) is the fundamental human right upon which all other human rights are founded and that territorial integrity and democracy are secondary considerations. Large cranial capacity shouldn't be a prerequisite for human rights. But it would be particularly rational for supporters of the principle of human rights to give priority to Hawaiian self-determination since they are particularly endangered by outbreeding and displacement and are obviously a unique ethny.
Well I noticed that Dave Brody stuck mention of space habitats at the end of the article after a whole lot of worthless back and forth so I suppose I owe him something of an apology -- but really -- doesn't he know how far out to lunch the debate has gotten since Zubrin hit the public relations mill? Why bury the ultimate solution when it is already so buried?
Ad Astra was originally a space settlement magazine when the L5 Society merged with the National Space Society on condition that the emphasis on space settlement remain its ultimate priority.
What is the difference between a space settlement and a terraformed planet, you might ask?
The fact that you need to ask is evidence that the foundation of the National Space Society was long ago abrogated for more "fashionable" pursuits, such as those promoted by hucksters like Zubrin.
One of the better answers to that question is in Mike Combs' Space Settlement FAQ
Since the Ad Astrans have had the unmitigated chutzpah to quote the originator of the space settlement idea without talking about actual space settlement -- pretending the idea simply doesn't exist, I'm going to provide an appropriate rebuttal: The entirety of Mr. Combs' FAQ.
What is space settlement?
Space settlement is the concept of colonizing space by using extraterrestrial resources to construct artificial, closed-ecology habitats in orbit.
What is a space habitat?
A space habitat would be a pressurized sphere, cylinder, or torus (donut shape), rotating on its axis so that centrifugal force serves as an artificial gravity. The interior is landscaped with soil, water, and vegetation. Sunlight would be gathered by mirrors and reflected into the interior of the habitat through windows. The goal is to create as Earth-like an environment as possible.
How is space settlement different from any of the other space colonization proposals?
Most thinking regarding human expansion into space has focused on the settling of the surfaces of other planets, sometimes after modifying their environments to make them more Earth-like (called terraforming). The space settlement concept maintains that planets are not the most ideal location for human colonies beyond the Earth.
Aren't we going to terraform Mars or Venus?
Terraforming is a long-term project requiring technology significantly advanced over what we have today. Even terraforming advocates admit it would take a minimum of 200 years to modify Mars to the stage where even simple anaerobic microorganisms and algae can survive. [Ref: Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments, Martyn J. Fogg, SAE Press 1995.] Space habitats, on the other hand, can be built with today's technology, and would be homes in space which people initiating the program could move into within their lifetimes.
Interstellar travel may someday become possible, but we have no guarantee that Earth-like planets will be as plentiful in the Milky Way galaxy as they have been in Hollywood, CA.
What advantages would orbital settlements have over a colony built on another planet?
Sunlight also drives the life-support system of the habitat, so the day/night cycle can be set to whatever is convenient. Compare this to the moon, where there is 14 days of continuous daylight, and then a 14-day-long night. Here, some alternate energy source would probably have to be used half the time.
Wait, aren't you forgetting the greatest legacy of all? The failure to pass along their values (not to mention real estate equity and job security) resulting in the failure of the boomers to have viable families which resulted in the largest demographic collapse the west has ever experienced -- a population implosion that justified the opening of the borders to illegal immigrants "seeking a better life for their families".