This is exactly the reason that the idea of a unmanned/robot army is such a horrible thing. It dehumanizes the conflict and makes war less and less of a "worse" choice.
Look, last I checked, we don't need robots to dehumanize war.
I could sit hear all day and list countless examples of how normal people turn into rabid killing machines for the nation or belief and how war doesn't need technology to dehumanize attrocities.
What technology does do is make war more impersonal and amplifies what a small group of people can do to another group. As in... I don't have to get in your face and stab you with sword, but I can shoot a rapid fire machine gun at 300m and kill more men in a second than in a day with a sword. There will probaly always be war as long as man is around. Maybe there will be bits and times of peace, but eventually I'd dar say once man is in the stars and colonized other systems we will see wars out there too.
Robots might even be better than humans. Most war attrocities have occurred when the soldiers on the ground freak out because of war stress or maybe because of retaliation and round up villagers/pows and force them to dig their own graves and then shoot them. The digging the graves is often optional.(see the My Lai Massacre
Heck... Those guys might not even be that stressed out but they might be just pissed off for stories they heard on the war (see Balkan Wars)
Robots won't disobey war cimes orders nor will they have a concious thinking to themselves "gee maybe this is wrong", but as the record stands now, most humans don't seem to have a problem with commiting war crimes either given the right circumstances.
Ethical war condunct is the responbility of the government and those controlling the weapons. If you tell your robots to murder civilians, you are just as guilty as the person who told his human soldiers to murder civilians.
The benefit of robots, is and always will be the saving of lives of "our" fighting men and women. The US military will proceed with this whether we like it or not and the public will support it because it is their sons and daughters that are dying.
They have the most computing power of anyone on earth. They're trying to sort the world's information. What better to do that with than strong AI?
When I was reading "Age of Spiritual Machines", Ray Kurzweil gave an example of "evolution" AI that basically brute forces the stock market by creating simulations based off certain criteria that would determine whether or not to purchase a stock. The simulatons that picks stocks that raised in priced lived, and all the others died. Then those surviors would have their code replicated a couple billion times and then each of those new versions would have the code slightly replicated and the next round of evolution would happen.
It occurred to me that if one could build a machine that could have each of the programs check all pages on the internet for changes in criteria (as in CNN reported business made such a profit or bad comments on forums about certain companies), but then I realized this would take a search engine as big as google to do this...
But then it dawned on me that what if google is already doing this? I mean they basically have constant caching of the internet. If they wanted to, they could write an algorythim to look at all this data and determine what patterns cause certain stocks to rise and then once they've trained a box to do this then they could litterly consume all other companies.
Maybe a bit far fetched, but a company could do it... Google has the resources now to.
(disclaimer, I maybe a bit biased about the whole singularity thing)
The sweet thing about the new Honda Borg is that once you've keyed the lock the car will drive itself to your crib. And if the cops intervene, there'll be no one in it to arrest!
Unless of course the anti-theft discovers your bio-metrics don't match the car owner and decides to drive you to the police station.
Unfortunately, as self driving cars become more and more viable, we're going to run into a liability problem. Sure, the self driving cars can probably cut crashes and resulting deaths by some huge percent, but there will still be some that happen.
If my brakes fail and I hit somebody, can that person sue my car company, the people that fixed my brakes last month, or what happens if I am lazy bastard and the car isn't in warranty and I never got my brakes fixed recently.
Oh yeah... My insurance pays for it.
I'm sure insurance companies will have extra "automation" insurance (no pun intended) for your computers in which if it wrecks the car, they pay for it.
However, I bet insurance companies will catch on that computer drivers will cost them less than human drivers. Secondly, insurance companies will put the pressure on the car makers to make them as safe as possible so they can take your money and have less probability of you getting in an accident.
"It is easy problem to learn the things we do not know. The harder problem is trying know things that we do not know that we do not know."
Personally, I wonder if I am limited by the English language to thoughts I wish to express. Maybe my mind is a computer, the neurons the cpu, my memories is the hard drive storage, but my language is the OS.
However, what if I have Qbasic for DOS for my speaking language? No matter how powerful my brain is, I can't use this to create say "Doom 4" though expression for the mind. I'd need a specialized C++ compiler that optimized neurons in such a pattern to acheive this.
What if that language doesn't exist yet? Is it possible that my brain could have thoughts and emotions, but can't because I can't use language to express them.
On the bright side, English is a quickly mutating bastard language which seems fairly evolvable but sometimes I wonder if I should learn Japanese, Russian, or German and then end up with a new outlook on life.
Eventually the employees found him in a dark "virtual" batting cage. He got a good lecture for taking off like that, but then managed to sneak out of an ambulence he was "driving" just a few minutes later. (He's a sneaky bugger. I was sitting right next to him, look down at the radio, look up and he's gone.)
Have you ever considered spanking him? I know this may sound crass, but my father told me that the only time they ever spanked me is when I was in physical danger. One being that I would run out into a busy road and the other is when I leave them in a public place.
Even though he was technically a hippie during this time in 70s early 80s and swore he would never spank his children like his more conservatie parents.
However, he did find the congnative powers of my small mind weren't up to the task of understanding certain things and instead of letting me just end up darwining myself out of existence, he chose to use the extreme action of putting his hand to my bottom.
Even with my meager mental abilities to understand the effects of physics of oncoming cars on my little body or that the ability of strangers to wisk me away, I did understand that if I wandered close to the road out in front of the house alone or wandered away from my parents in public I would get a spanking.
(but personally if I was a parent, I would perfer a more technical solution with RDIF tags, kid lease, or a frence...)
Imagine a pair of sunglasses that overlay details of the car engine you're looking at or map notes as you travel around town.
Imagine? The stuff already exists... Called the Nomad Expert System ( a type of Virtual Retina Display)Albeit kind of expensive and not exactly in sunglass form factor, but really close.
I would think that it's tough for pirates to download games... I can't imagine you'd be able to get much bandwidth out there on the high seas.
Not when ye have a Galleon loaded with 20 cannon, 100 vicious men, and a cargo hold filled to the brim with ye backup tapes traveling at 5 knots due to a ragin carribean storm!
They're a public company, so if it isn't making them money, then why would they do it.
That is a good question.
Microsoft lost money the Xbox. So why did they continue with Xbox 360?
Because they are trying to gain market dominance regardless of price.
Google might try the same thing. In the end, it is far better for a company to acheive this than simply try to get a profit in short term quarter earning reports.
I was just thinking about how 4 years ago you could build a terabyte array for about $5-10,000 down from many millions 8 years ago. Today, you can get a terabyte for less than $500. In a few years, a petabyte is only going to cost $5,000.
There is nothing inherent to OS X that makes it virus proof.
Well the lack of Active X kind of helps... But seriously, the only way to get a virus on OS X is user interaction by a very unknowledgable computer. Not something in which you go to a web page and *bam* your infected with malware and a rootkit.
Believe it or not, some people like to talk about God, err, Intelligent Design, whatever you wanna call it.
Apparently, Griffin does not.
FTFA:
Griffin: NASA as an agency and I as its administrator should be mindful of the specific instructions we receive from the president and the Congress. That is what we do. If I obey my instructions from the Congress and follow the law, then I've done my job. When I was very young, I was told that a gentleman never engages in public discussions of politics, sex and religion. And I think I'll stay with that advice and not go beyond where I was, which is: my objective as administrator is to carry out the instructions I'm given by our elected representatives on behalf of the American people. The American people have very diverse views on politics, sex and religion and I believe I should leave them to it.
...how often we have to unlearn what we've been taught for so long by scientists. This has been one of the more basic tenets of astronomy, something almost always mentioned when discussing extrasolar planets at any length. And now we're being told that two hundred years of teaching was wrong?
I know you are somewhat joking, but...
The point of scientific truth, is that there are no constant truths except maybe speed of light. (Even then people are trying to disprove that as we speak)
You must assume everything taught in scientific theory is probable, but someday someone could come along and provide a better theory and make the previous theory look horribly stupid in retrospect.
What science attempts to find is basically a logical methodology of how things appear to work and try to predict what happens if we perform x action under y criteria.
Cause and effect.
But the problem is that the universe is not constant (except for speed of light) and that all things time, distance, position, chemical makeup, atomic makeup, and various other things are constantly changing.
I always like to give my sky example for this.
I make a hypothetical statement about the color of the sky which is "The sky is blue!"
Is this true or false? On a sunny day this is very true, but on a cloudy day or at night it is not.
But if we say at 10am, at Sometown USA, and the weather is clear then the sky should be blue. If the same conditions exist tomorrow, my theory would say that the sky should be blue.
The problem with thinking science makes things always true and set in stone is a fallacy since there are a trillion different criteria we still don't know about yet.
But the more we know, the better we can understand the universe.
Population
- Total (2000)
- Density Ranked 47th 642 200 3.59/km (47th)
Yeah, I spent more time visiting South Dakota, but they both pretty much have seas worth of open spaces... This kind of idea would probaly work, because most peoples closest neighbors might be 10-30 miles away. In towns its a bit different though, but if wide area coverage is what you are looking for, these baloons are actually a good idea for these areas.
Now, to "decode" that would mean that it's encrypted somehow, but it's not. It's there in strands in the center of a cell's nucleus. Maybe "extract" would work as a verb, but we're certainly not cracking any encryption. Do I use RSA encryption to protect my genes from you? No. Even if I did, they'd likely only have to crack it once unless everyone used separate public keys.
Well there is a bit of encryption of the human body in the DNA. The code itself only is about 20mb, but yet it can some how produce thousands of trillions worth of cells arranged in a fairly organized pattern far more complex than the raw DNA code.
Think of it of like a Zip file in which we've got the zip file and we've got the expanded file, but we don't really have a clear picture of how to its compressed or decompressed into working beings with some type of say... Encryption key.
(and yeah the original article didn't say decode, but I could see where they could come from)
Slashdot Mirror
A beta of a Microsoft product has bugs? Color me surprised!
A final version of a Microsoft product has bugs? Color me suprised!
That would be cool, but like my DS, I bet it would scratch a lot.
Personally, I want to see a 20gb iPod Nano. It might be a while, but I realy enjoy my current Nano, but I wish it had more space.
This is exactly the reason that the idea of a unmanned/robot army is such a horrible thing. It dehumanizes the conflict and makes war less and less of a "worse" choice.
Look, last I checked, we don't need robots to dehumanize war.
It doesn't take Strong AI to get the Nationalistic or dogmatic fervor up in which thousands or millions of your own people are screaming at the top of the lungs "Death to the infidels!", "For the motherland/fatherland!" (depending which side you are on), or "Let's napalm those sons of bitches... for FREEDOM!"
I could sit hear all day and list countless examples of how normal people turn into rabid killing machines for the nation or belief and how war doesn't need technology to dehumanize attrocities.
What technology does do is make war more impersonal and amplifies what a small group of people can do to another group. As in... I don't have to get in your face and stab you with sword, but I can shoot a rapid fire machine gun at 300m and kill more men in a second than in a day with a sword. There will probaly always be war as long as man is around. Maybe there will be bits and times of peace, but eventually I'd dar say once man is in the stars and colonized other systems we will see wars out there too.
Robots might even be better than humans. Most war attrocities have occurred when the soldiers on the ground freak out because of war stress or maybe because of retaliation and round up villagers/pows and force them to dig their own graves and then shoot them. The digging the graves is often optional.(see the My Lai Massacre
Heck... Those guys might not even be that stressed out but they might be just pissed off for stories they heard on the war (see Balkan Wars)
Robots won't disobey war cimes orders nor will they have a concious thinking to themselves "gee maybe this is wrong", but as the record stands now, most humans don't seem to have a problem with commiting war crimes either given the right circumstances.
Ethical war condunct is the responbility of the government and those controlling the weapons. If you tell your robots to murder civilians, you are just as guilty as the person who told his human soldiers to murder civilians.
The benefit of robots, is and always will be the saving of lives of "our" fighting men and women. The US military will proceed with this whether we like it or not and the public will support it because it is their sons and daughters that are dying.
No signs of Doctor Who getting cancelled any time soon.
BBC doesn't count. Mostly because they don't have the ratings department breathing down people's necks because they couldn't sell enough adds.
Do you have business men and teenage girls flying into your car often?
Yes. At least that is what I told the judge. But I think its more of a case of my car's bumper flying into their bodies at the cross walk.
"Slashdot" is not a guy with two sets of opinions that contradict, it's a lot of people with their own opinions in one place.
Actually, "Slashdot" is a supercomputer with a jabberwacky chat program that automatically generated posts based on 1,000,000 personality disorders.
Every now and then a human will log to it and reply to a post... And try to reason with it.
I take it you are that human?
They have the most computing power of anyone on earth. They're trying to sort the world's information. What better to do that with than strong AI?
When I was reading "Age of Spiritual Machines", Ray Kurzweil gave an example of "evolution" AI that basically brute forces the stock market by creating simulations based off certain criteria that would determine whether or not to purchase a stock. The simulatons that picks stocks that raised in priced lived, and all the others died. Then those surviors would have their code replicated a couple billion times and then each of those new versions would have the code slightly replicated and the next round of evolution would happen.
It occurred to me that if one could build a machine that could have each of the programs check all pages on the internet for changes in criteria (as in CNN reported business made such a profit or bad comments on forums about certain companies), but then I realized this would take a search engine as big as google to do this...
But then it dawned on me that what if google is already doing this? I mean they basically have constant caching of the internet. If they wanted to, they could write an algorythim to look at all this data and determine what patterns cause certain stocks to rise and then once they've trained a box to do this then they could litterly consume all other companies.
Maybe a bit far fetched, but a company could do it... Google has the resources now to.
(disclaimer, I maybe a bit biased about the whole singularity thing)
The sweet thing about the new Honda Borg is that once you've keyed the lock the car will drive itself to your crib. And if the cops intervene, there'll be no one in it to arrest!
Unless of course the anti-theft discovers your bio-metrics don't match the car owner and decides to drive you to the police station.
Unfortunately, as self driving cars become more and more viable, we're going to run into a liability problem. Sure, the self driving cars can probably cut crashes and resulting deaths by some huge percent, but there will still be some that happen.
If my brakes fail and I hit somebody, can that person sue my car company, the people that fixed my brakes last month, or what happens if I am lazy bastard and the car isn't in warranty and I never got my brakes fixed recently.
Oh yeah... My insurance pays for it.
I'm sure insurance companies will have extra "automation" insurance (no pun intended) for your computers in which if it wrecks the car, they pay for it.
However, I bet insurance companies will catch on that computer drivers will cost them less than human drivers. Secondly, insurance companies will put the pressure on the car makers to make them as safe as possible so they can take your money and have less probability of you getting in an accident.
"It is easy problem to learn the things we do not know. The harder problem is trying know things that we do not know that we do not know."
Personally, I wonder if I am limited by the English language to thoughts I wish to express. Maybe my mind is a computer, the neurons the cpu, my memories is the hard drive storage, but my language is the OS.
However, what if I have Qbasic for DOS for my speaking language? No matter how powerful my brain is, I can't use this to create say "Doom 4" though expression for the mind. I'd need a specialized C++ compiler that optimized neurons in such a pattern to acheive this.
What if that language doesn't exist yet? Is it possible that my brain could have thoughts and emotions, but can't because I can't use language to express them.
On the bright side, English is a quickly mutating bastard language which seems fairly evolvable but sometimes I wonder if I should learn Japanese, Russian, or German and then end up with a new outlook on life.
Eventually the employees found him in a dark "virtual" batting cage. He got a good lecture for taking off like that, but then managed to sneak out of an ambulence he was "driving" just a few minutes later. (He's a sneaky bugger. I was sitting right next to him, look down at the radio, look up and he's gone.)
Have you ever considered spanking him? I know this may sound crass, but my father told me that the only time they ever spanked me is when I was in physical danger. One being that I would run out into a busy road and the other is when I leave them in a public place.
Even though he was technically a hippie during this time in 70s early 80s and swore he would never spank his children like his more conservatie parents.
However, he did find the congnative powers of my small mind weren't up to the task of understanding certain things and instead of letting me just end up darwining myself out of existence, he chose to use the extreme action of putting his hand to my bottom.
Even with my meager mental abilities to understand the effects of physics of oncoming cars on my little body or that the ability of strangers to wisk me away, I did understand that if I wandered close to the road out in front of the house alone or wandered away from my parents in public I would get a spanking.
(but personally if I was a parent, I would perfer a more technical solution with RDIF tags, kid lease, or a frence...)
Tripewrie will hopefully get it pushed out the door in February even though they've been holding off for final tweaks.
http://www.redorchestragame.com/
Mostly likey the most realistic FPS so far as far as WWII combat goes...
Imagine a pair of sunglasses that overlay details of the car engine you're looking at or map notes as you travel around town.
Imagine? The stuff already exists... Called the Nomad Expert System ( a type of Virtual Retina Display)Albeit kind of expensive and not exactly in sunglass form factor, but really close.
http://www.microvision.com/nomadexpert/index.html
I would think that it's tough for pirates to download games... I can't imagine you'd be able to get much bandwidth out there on the high seas.
Not when ye have a Galleon loaded with 20 cannon, 100 vicious men, and a cargo hold filled to the brim with ye backup tapes traveling at 5 knots due to a ragin carribean storm!
Yar! Thar be ye bandwidth!
If they give it away for free - corporations won't use it.
Oh you mean like Internet Explorer?
They're a public company, so if it isn't making them money, then why would they do it.
That is a good question.
Microsoft lost money the Xbox. So why did they continue with Xbox 360?
Because they are trying to gain market dominance regardless of price.
Google might try the same thing. In the end, it is far better for a company to acheive this than simply try to get a profit in short term quarter earning reports.
I was just thinking about how 4 years ago you could build a terabyte array for about $5-10,000 down from many millions 8 years ago. Today, you can get a terabyte for less than $500. In a few years, a petabyte is only going to cost $5,000.
Law of Accelerating Returns
There is nothing inherent to OS X that makes it virus proof.
Well the lack of Active X kind of helps... But seriously, the only way to get a virus on OS X is user interaction by a very unknowledgable computer. Not something in which you go to a web page and *bam* your infected with malware and a rootkit.
FTA: 156.33.*.*
Maybe this'll come in handy someday. Can't imagine what I'd use it for though.
Well, if you host a pr0n ftp and some one is leeching... I'd make a wager on what ranges to ban first.
I am obligated to point out that the character you are quoting to back up your argument is a lunatic.
Sometimes it takes an insane person to admit the truth.
Apparently, Griffin does not.
FTFA:
...how often we have to unlearn what we've been taught for so long by scientists. This has been one of the more basic tenets of astronomy, something almost always mentioned when discussing extrasolar planets at any length. And now we're being told that two hundred years of teaching was wrong?
I know you are somewhat joking, but...
The point of scientific truth, is that there are no constant truths except maybe speed of light. (Even then people are trying to disprove that as we speak)
You must assume everything taught in scientific theory is probable, but someday someone could come along and provide a better theory and make the previous theory look horribly stupid in retrospect.
What science attempts to find is basically a logical methodology of how things appear to work and try to predict what happens if we perform x action under y criteria.
Cause and effect.
But the problem is that the universe is not constant (except for speed of light) and that all things time, distance, position, chemical makeup, atomic makeup, and various other things are constantly changing.
I always like to give my sky example for this.
I make a hypothetical statement about the color of the sky which is "The sky is blue!"
Is this true or false? On a sunny day this is very true, but on a cloudy day or at night it is not.
But if we say at 10am, at Sometown USA, and the weather is clear then the sky should be blue. If the same conditions exist tomorrow, my theory would say that the sky should be blue.
The problem with thinking science makes things always true and set in stone is a fallacy since there are a trillion different criteria we still don't know about yet.
But the more we know, the better we can understand the universe.
1) Avoiding a possible unfair competition suit.
2) To be able to sell the service on a monthly fee basis.
3) Be like OS X and be secure enough not to need anti-virus software.
I'm not getting my hopes up though.
I can just see these balloons falling in some interesting places like some guy driving 80mph down a highway and hitting one of them.
;)
Have you been to North Dakota?
If someone falls out of the sky in either of those states, you've got a 99.9999% of hitting empty space.
The other 0.0001% will involve you hitting a cow or maybe a pheasant bird
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Dakota
Population
- Total (2000)
- Density Ranked 47th
642 200
3.59/km (47th)
Yeah, I spent more time visiting South Dakota, but they both pretty much have seas worth of open spaces... This kind of idea would probaly work, because most peoples closest neighbors might be 10-30 miles away. In towns its a bit different though, but if wide area coverage is what you are looking for, these baloons are actually a good idea for these areas.
Now, to "decode" that would mean that it's encrypted somehow, but it's not. It's there in strands in the center of a cell's nucleus. Maybe "extract" would work as a verb, but we're certainly not cracking any encryption. Do I use RSA encryption to protect my genes from you? No. Even if I did, they'd likely only have to crack it once unless everyone used separate public keys.
Well there is a bit of encryption of the human body in the DNA. The code itself only is about 20mb, but yet it can some how produce thousands of trillions worth of cells arranged in a fairly organized pattern far more complex than the raw DNA code.
Think of it of like a Zip file in which we've got the zip file and we've got the expanded file, but we don't really have a clear picture of how to its compressed or decompressed into working beings with some type of say... Encryption key.
(and yeah the original article didn't say decode, but I could see where they could come from)