The reason he said not to talk to aliens is because they are probably a high tech space-faring species with big ships and guns which may not be friendly to strangers.
Ironically, this seems to be what he suggests we should become.
Ironic? Perhaps. Still, having the power to choose is what happiness is all about.
The link goes to a site dedicated to "50/50 by 2150". Interesting concept.
One major flaw I can see, right off the bat:
How, exactly are you going to get 3.5 billion people to let the other 3.5 billion people move into their living/working space?
Hopefully, the phase in period of 100+ years could make the transition less abrupt... haven't we added 3.5B people over the last 100 years, too? I suppose the real challenge is in dropping the birth rate, but security from hunger, disease and war seems to do that pretty automatically - so, all we need is world peace, universal health care, and a continued farm subsidy.... is Jimmy Carter still alive?
Hi, I am the person who did this with a g1. The source and schematics have been available at http://hackaday.com/2010/11/10/android-talks-pulsewave/ for a little longer than a year now. We've been selling these things since March 2010. No slashdot for us?
Submit your story, the gods of what gets posted seem to have gone really soft lately, lots of first time submitters getting published lately.
most likely... what's the cost (including logistics, support, benefit pay, etc.) to deploy a marine to Afghanistan for a year? For every 10 marines deployed "over there" for a year, could we get one up to the ISS?
We're all going to become happy fluffy hippies and live a sustainable lifestyle in little teepees where we'll end all conflict by singing happy songs and shit.
Hey, I was just thinking that, except I was thinking that 99% of us would still live in cities and stuff while maybe 1% drops out, tunes in, and gets with the pre-Columbian vibe. You never know, those DIYers who can live (and reproduce) without a whole pile of techno-infrastructure, like the American Indians did, could come in handy some day.
I have used LoJack on my car for about 15 years now. One benefit of LoJack is that there is no recurring fee (other than battery check / replacement), and it is supported by most law enforcement agencies.
The disadvantage of LoJack for something like $400 vs a DIY thing for $200ish (all told after you pay for EVERYTHING related to it) is that you can't play with it and do your own location of your scooter when it isn't really stolen.
If you value the play factor, you might consider getting one of the GPS kid tracking cell phones, but monthly fees will get you up to over $400 before you finish 4 years of school, even for the cheapest of cell phones.
If you want to go full nerd on it, you can get a HAM foxhunt type solution with or without GPS. If you're honest about what you spend on such a setup, you'll be far above the cost of a LoJack which is essentially the fox transmitter, with the local Police picking up the tab on the hound locator/receiver for you.
As for the absence of any storms visible from orbit, what's our Martian weather coverage and resolution like? Presumably, not all Martian dust storms are runaway planet-wide events.
There should be some appropriate jab at how conservatives take their own limited view of the cosmos and extrapolate it universally, all the while espousing a knowledge of statistics and sample sizes, but either being ignorant of how they really work, or more insidiously lying (to themselves more than anybody else) about how much data they have to back themselves up. I won't bother veiling it in anything remotely on-topic, just calling it how I see it, from my bathtub.
I occasionally work with a "public service" office that makes little flyers and similar things for families that need them. They get sporadic grant money and have a few old Macs that they do their word processing on, but they need to communicate with families outside the office that mostly don't have Macs, and usually don't have the money for MS Word, either. I introduced them to Open Office as a solution to their copy-pasting of stuff in and out of e-mails. It was a hard sell, they were worried it would hurt their computer, etc. etc. and, they would never presume to ask any of the families outside to install such a thing on their own computer.
Even when you "spread the word for good," and not just idealogical reasons, there is resistance.
But this isn't the first time it's been done with a smartphone. People were making little robots with Android G1 phones a while back using the headphone jack adapter. Is this somehow novel because it was done with an iPhone?
Of course not, beyond the fact that the Android G1 wasn't as media friendly as the iPhone... Android G1, sounds like an obscure geek toy (even though it's not, really). iPhone, well, that's accessible, isn't it? Even my acquaintances in marketing have iPhones, and know how to install apps on them too.
I feel the same way when people get excited about a project because "it's so accessible, it's on an Arduino."
The grocery store I worked in (20+ years ago) had a sort of "thieves code" instilled by some of the managers, they would openly abuse the breakage bin in-front of the employees, and when a new employee would finally do it in-front of them they were "in the club." Abusing the breakage bin typically consisted of ripping a bag of cookies or similar, taking a few, and sending the rest back to the vendor for credit. After induction to the club, the manager would explain which products could be returned for vendor credit, which couldn't, etc.
Nobody was ever disciplined or fired for abusing the breakage bin, but there were a few fired for other reasons - citing the breakage bin abuse instead of the actual reason for firing.
The implied innovation (that keeps coming up in these "iPhone and other smartphone") is in dusting off old ideas that can be implemented with the "now ubiquitous" technology.
Old ideas that require a kilometers long particle accelerator, or three mules and 45 feet of leather strapping aren't nearly as exciting as seeing something cool done with this cheap computer with a radio transmitter that you keep in a pocket next to your gonads.
I once got kudos from Mr. Dean Kamen for employing a Handspring Visor to do medical datalogging. Yeah, medical datalogging had been done before, our company had been doing mostly that for the previous 25 years, and we didn't have anything to do with development of the Palm Pilot or the Visor, but we recognized the newly affordable, highly portable computers for their potential as a significant component of what was previously a much larger, more expensive, and less portable system. Sure, it could have been done 3 years earlier with "off the shelf" tech, but using the Visor dropped the development costs of the overall system by nearly an order of magnitude. I was a little embarrassed when he said it, but, looking back, we had the idea fairly far along in development as an accessory to interface to the serial port of a Palm Pilot before the Visor was announced, and when the Visor was announced, we backed up (maybe a month's work) to redo the device as an "on the bus" expansion board for the Visor instead. Our timing to take advantage of the Visor launch couldn't have been better - completely accidental, but that's how it worked out.
For what it's worth, investment bankers took over the spinoff company that developed the idea, they got all queasy about depending on other companies and "non commodity technology" to support their investment so they went much more vertically integrated, building their own PDA, and recoding all the PC side software in Visual Studio and MFC (from Borland's OWL). In some senses, they were right, Borland and Palm/Handspring did die fairly soon thereafter, but in another view, their prescience about these problems is what hobbled their growth, taking almost a year to re-code the software, and longer to build their own PDA - if they had pushed harder on what they had in-hand, their time to market would have been dramatically reduced, and maybe they would have done better for the original investors. As it turned out, they just plodded along, slipping into chapter 11 about 10 years down the road.
Nice job missing my point. Miami is a place that experiences relatively frequent hurricanes, but if you landed a probe there and gathered data from January 1, 1970 through January 1, 1990, I don't think, in 20 years of data collection, that you would have ever witnessed a single 80+mph wind event.
Yes, they also used data gathered from orbit and other sources, but, obviously, their methods were flawed in some way - perhaps relying too much on the only two surface probes they had was a part of the problem?
As far as not seeing any hurricanes from orbit, I seem to recall periodic planetwide dust storms on Mars - did the researchers feel that these were not enough to obscure their observations?
The revolt of the machines you talk about, from what I can see is more likely to result from poor engineering.
You know, before about 1997, I would have agreed with you. But looking at how the internet was implemented globally, I think we can safely assume that poor engineering will be the rule, rather than the exception, for the next rollout of disruptive technology.
The process of creating any viable AI would likely involve 'killing' it multiple times.
Agreed, almost definitely.
Is it then unethical to create an AI?
Some would say so, although not likely for the reason that in creating it you will have to kill many infant versions of it during development. I do not say it is unethical, yet, nor that an AI creator should never wipe programs.
However, what I am saying, is that, eventually, there will come a point where it is unethical. That our creations will at some point deserve our respect and to be treated as the equals that they then will be. Recognizing when that point happens will be tricky, and possibly fraught with dire consequences if we get it terribly wrong.
Of course, I also believe that the dolphins, whales and some of the apes also deserve this level of respect that we, as a species, obviously still don't give them most of the time, and I guess we're getting away with it on them... Still, the higher mammals aren't wired into our infrastructure the way AI programs are already, and undoubtedly will be in the future.
Already, high frequency trading algorithms read the news and take actions based on what they "learn" from it, actions that affect the price of stocks across all the major exchanges. I doubt any of these algorithms are sentient, yet. I imagine that sentience, self awareness, or something else entirely but equally significant, will more likely arise as an emergent property of interacting systems, rather than something deliberately programmed.
My short list includes: Firefox, Open Office, GIMP and VLC. If they might write software, add Qt Creator (or MIT Scratch if they're under 14 years old).
This is why the big nukes are being abandoned. Why build a huge bomb which might fail to do the job, when you can build a much smaller bomb (here I'm think a smaller nuclear weapon, not some 5000 lbs bomb) which can hit much more precisely and do the job better?
And, somehow, I still hope that we also secretly have developed big nukes that can be delivered with great precision, whether they need it or not...
Slashdot Mirror
The reason he said not to talk to aliens is because they are probably a high tech space-faring species with big ships and guns which may not be friendly to strangers.
Ironically, this seems to be what he suggests we should become.
Ironic? Perhaps. Still, having the power to choose is what happiness is all about.
The link goes to a site dedicated to "50/50 by 2150". Interesting concept.
One major flaw I can see, right off the bat:
How, exactly are you going to get 3.5 billion people to let the other 3.5 billion people move into their living/working space?
Hopefully, the phase in period of 100+ years could make the transition less abrupt... haven't we added 3.5B people over the last 100 years, too? I suppose the real challenge is in dropping the birth rate, but security from hunger, disease and war seems to do that pretty automatically - so, all we need is world peace, universal health care, and a continued farm subsidy.... is Jimmy Carter still alive?
Hi, I am the person who did this with a g1. The source and schematics have been available at http://hackaday.com/2010/11/10/android-talks-pulsewave/ for a little longer than a year now. We've been selling these things since March 2010. No slashdot for us?
Submit your story, the gods of what gets posted seem to have gone really soft lately, lots of first time submitters getting published lately.
I'm guessing they also did not do the therapeutic claims dance appropriately to receive approval.
My favorite:
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-02-24/
cost per Kg to LEO is between $5,000-$10,000
But it's the politicians fault...
most likely... what's the cost (including logistics, support, benefit pay, etc.) to deploy a marine to Afghanistan for a year? For every 10 marines deployed "over there" for a year, could we get one up to the ISS?
Keeping a Dr. Strangelove quote prepared and ready to copy paste, there has to be some kind of geek badge for that.
We're all going to become happy fluffy hippies and live a sustainable lifestyle in little teepees where we'll end all conflict by singing happy songs and shit.
Hey, I was just thinking that, except I was thinking that 99% of us would still live in cities and stuff while maybe 1% drops out, tunes in, and gets with the pre-Columbian vibe. You never know, those DIYers who can live (and reproduce) without a whole pile of techno-infrastructure, like the American Indians did, could come in handy some day.
Seriously, what we need is a good predator that preys upon the fat and stupid.
CAD? (Coronary Artery Disease)
So he wants us to explore space, but not talk to aliens.
Not mutually exclusive. In fact, we should probably colonize space before inviting aliens to the neighborhood.
Colonizing space is a nice idea, it has been my dream since I was five. However, I have another suggestion that could also work.
I have used LoJack on my car for about 15 years now. One benefit of LoJack is that there is no recurring fee (other than battery check / replacement), and it is supported by most law enforcement agencies.
The disadvantage of LoJack for something like $400 vs a DIY thing for $200ish (all told after you pay for EVERYTHING related to it) is that you can't play with it and do your own location of your scooter when it isn't really stolen.
If you value the play factor, you might consider getting one of the GPS kid tracking cell phones, but monthly fees will get you up to over $400 before you finish 4 years of school, even for the cheapest of cell phones.
If you want to go full nerd on it, you can get a HAM foxhunt type solution with or without GPS. If you're honest about what you spend on such a setup, you'll be far above the cost of a LoJack which is essentially the fox transmitter, with the local Police picking up the tab on the hound locator/receiver for you.
Wow, a leap to global warming, but from where?
As for the absence of any storms visible from orbit, what's our Martian weather coverage and resolution like? Presumably, not all Martian dust storms are runaway planet-wide events.
There should be some appropriate jab at how conservatives take their own limited view of the cosmos and extrapolate it universally, all the while espousing a knowledge of statistics and sample sizes, but either being ignorant of how they really work, or more insidiously lying (to themselves more than anybody else) about how much data they have to back themselves up. I won't bother veiling it in anything remotely on-topic, just calling it how I see it, from my bathtub.
I occasionally work with a "public service" office that makes little flyers and similar things for families that need them. They get sporadic grant money and have a few old Macs that they do their word processing on, but they need to communicate with families outside the office that mostly don't have Macs, and usually don't have the money for MS Word, either. I introduced them to Open Office as a solution to their copy-pasting of stuff in and out of e-mails. It was a hard sell, they were worried it would hurt their computer, etc. etc. and, they would never presume to ask any of the families outside to install such a thing on their own computer.
Even when you "spread the word for good," and not just idealogical reasons, there is resistance.
Ever notice that major restaurant chains don't sing the traditional "Happy Birthday to You!"?
AOL Time Warner currently collects about $2M per year in royalties on "Happy Birthday to You", originally popularized more than 80 years ago.
and, won't the world be such a better place when these rights are more vigorously protected? cough, gag
But this isn't the first time it's been done with a smartphone. People were making little robots with Android G1 phones a while back using the headphone jack adapter. Is this somehow novel because it was done with an iPhone?
Of course not, beyond the fact that the Android G1 wasn't as media friendly as the iPhone... Android G1, sounds like an obscure geek toy (even though it's not, really). iPhone, well, that's accessible, isn't it? Even my acquaintances in marketing have iPhones, and know how to install apps on them too.
I feel the same way when people get excited about a project because "it's so accessible, it's on an Arduino."
The grocery store I worked in (20+ years ago) had a sort of "thieves code" instilled by some of the managers, they would openly abuse the breakage bin in-front of the employees, and when a new employee would finally do it in-front of them they were "in the club." Abusing the breakage bin typically consisted of ripping a bag of cookies or similar, taking a few, and sending the rest back to the vendor for credit. After induction to the club, the manager would explain which products could be returned for vendor credit, which couldn't, etc.
Nobody was ever disciplined or fired for abusing the breakage bin, but there were a few fired for other reasons - citing the breakage bin abuse instead of the actual reason for firing.
1) Take any old but effective idea from the past ...
2) Use it on a Apple device
3)
4) PROFIT!
You forgot:
2.5) Sue anyone else using it
That would be 3.5, 3) is: wait for someone else to make a significant profit in an infringing area
The implied innovation (that keeps coming up in these "iPhone and other smartphone") is in dusting off old ideas that can be implemented with the "now ubiquitous" technology.
Old ideas that require a kilometers long particle accelerator, or three mules and 45 feet of leather strapping aren't nearly as exciting as seeing something cool done with this cheap computer with a radio transmitter that you keep in a pocket next to your gonads.
I once got kudos from Mr. Dean Kamen for employing a Handspring Visor to do medical datalogging. Yeah, medical datalogging had been done before, our company had been doing mostly that for the previous 25 years, and we didn't have anything to do with development of the Palm Pilot or the Visor, but we recognized the newly affordable, highly portable computers for their potential as a significant component of what was previously a much larger, more expensive, and less portable system. Sure, it could have been done 3 years earlier with "off the shelf" tech, but using the Visor dropped the development costs of the overall system by nearly an order of magnitude. I was a little embarrassed when he said it, but, looking back, we had the idea fairly far along in development as an accessory to interface to the serial port of a Palm Pilot before the Visor was announced, and when the Visor was announced, we backed up (maybe a month's work) to redo the device as an "on the bus" expansion board for the Visor instead. Our timing to take advantage of the Visor launch couldn't have been better - completely accidental, but that's how it worked out.
For what it's worth, investment bankers took over the spinoff company that developed the idea, they got all queasy about depending on other companies and "non commodity technology" to support their investment so they went much more vertically integrated, building their own PDA, and recoding all the PC side software in Visual Studio and MFC (from Borland's OWL). In some senses, they were right, Borland and Palm/Handspring did die fairly soon thereafter, but in another view, their prescience about these problems is what hobbled their growth, taking almost a year to re-code the software, and longer to build their own PDA - if they had pushed harder on what they had in-hand, their time to market would have been dramatically reduced, and maybe they would have done better for the original investors. As it turned out, they just plodded along, slipping into chapter 11 about 10 years down the road.
Nice job missing my point. Miami is a place that experiences relatively frequent hurricanes, but if you landed a probe there and gathered data from January 1, 1970 through January 1, 1990, I don't think, in 20 years of data collection, that you would have ever witnessed a single 80+mph wind event.
Yes, they also used data gathered from orbit and other sources, but, obviously, their methods were flawed in some way - perhaps relying too much on the only two surface probes they had was a part of the problem?
As far as not seeing any hurricanes from orbit, I seem to recall periodic planetwide dust storms on Mars - did the researchers feel that these were not enough to obscure their observations?
The revolt of the machines you talk about, from what I can see is more likely to result from poor engineering.
You know, before about 1997, I would have agreed with you. But looking at how the internet was implemented globally, I think we can safely assume that poor engineering will be the rule, rather than the exception, for the next rollout of disruptive technology.
The process of creating any viable AI would likely involve 'killing' it multiple times.
Agreed, almost definitely.
Is it then unethical to create an AI?
Some would say so, although not likely for the reason that in creating it you will have to kill many infant versions of it during development. I do not say it is unethical, yet, nor that an AI creator should never wipe programs.
However, what I am saying, is that, eventually, there will come a point where it is unethical. That our creations will at some point deserve our respect and to be treated as the equals that they then will be. Recognizing when that point happens will be tricky, and possibly fraught with dire consequences if we get it terribly wrong.
Of course, I also believe that the dolphins, whales and some of the apes also deserve this level of respect that we, as a species, obviously still don't give them most of the time, and I guess we're getting away with it on them... Still, the higher mammals aren't wired into our infrastructure the way AI programs are already, and undoubtedly will be in the future.
Already, high frequency trading algorithms read the news and take actions based on what they "learn" from it, actions that affect the price of stocks across all the major exchanges. I doubt any of these algorithms are sentient, yet. I imagine that sentience, self awareness, or something else entirely but equally significant, will more likely arise as an emergent property of interacting systems, rather than something deliberately programmed.
I'd love to love XBMC, but it just doesn't do it for me. Somehow, other solutions (like VLC) always seem more practical in real use.
My short list includes: Firefox, Open Office, GIMP and VLC. If they might write software, add Qt Creator (or MIT Scratch if they're under 14 years old).
Wow, that's weird. I guess good manners and politeness are just a thing of the past for America now.
Not all of America, but, yes, there are some exceptionally rude pockets here and there.
This is why the big nukes are being abandoned. Why build a huge bomb which might fail to do the job, when you can build a much smaller bomb (here I'm think a smaller nuclear weapon, not some 5000 lbs bomb) which can hit much more precisely and do the job better?
And, somehow, I still hope that we also secretly have developed big nukes that can be delivered with great precision, whether they need it or not...