The license terms are, in my reading, reasonable, but the use of the word "viral" in this context is inexcusable propaganda. Would it be possible to rewrite OS licenses such that Microsoft products were categorized as "Septic Software (as defined below in section 1.3.9.2 part c)"?
It's generally not a good idea to take historical fiction as history. I really enjoyed the TV series the Untouchables (90s version - alas, I was almost alone in this). Part of the amusement, though, is that Elliot Ness was portrayed as an earnest yuppie. I thought this was interesting, but I never went around saying, you know, yuppies were around before 1940 - look at Elliot Ness.
Whether or not most ADD has a biological component, there's no doubt at all that there's an environmental component. That's why there are environmental adaptations, right?
Your point, which is a straw man argument anyway, isn't particularly supported by your so-called evidence. Notice that I don't call you names about it, by the way.
Where do they even get these numbers? Are they tracking GETs at an ISP? Which one?
I doubt these numbers mean anything for two reasons that haven't been mentioned yet: 1) time on a site is an ill-defined quantity - if I minimize Netscape and open emacs, am I still on/.? 2) how do you get around sample bias?
The real shortage isn't content, either
on
Telecosm
·
· Score: 5
In the end, Gilder's book may best be thought of as a call to arms: start wasting bandwidth, and start working on solving the next problem -- one of novel creation.
Bah.
There is no content shortage. There is a content surplus. There is an attention shortage. The consumer of content is a conscious intelligence, and each such consumer has a maximum of 24 hours per day of such attention to allocate to content.
Building content to expand to fill bandwidth will just result in bigger, faster and more extensive drivel. The content provider needs to focus on quality, and the network needs to find a way to pay for it.
The date of first use of the expression "operating system" is at least a well-defined quantity. Is it a known quantity? Who first described what they had as the "operating system", and when did it get abbreviated to "OS"?
Sad to see that the slashdot community is as confused about this issue as everybody else. I guess I hoped that somehow they'd do better.
Anyhow, for what it's worth, let me try to clarify the sea level thing. Melting sea ice has no effect on sea level (eureka!) because a floating object displaces exactly its weight of water. Melting glaciers and thermal expansion of water can cause sea level to increase. Both of these effects are basically inevitable in the coming century or two.
There's a countervailing phenomenon, which is that the snowfall onto the glacial landmasses (a.k.a. Greenland and Antarctica) is likely to increase under global warming, since warmer polar air can deliver more precipitation. This phenomenon would cause sea levels to drop. Best bets are that this phenomenon will be much smaller than the others, and sea level will rise gradually, unless there is a massive failure of a huge glacier.
The most likely candidate for that is the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which would be capable of raising sea level a few meters more or less abruptly if it were to slide into the ocean.
Now about the "still recovering from the ice age"
thing, that's true about sea level, since the
continents are still bouncing back from the weight of the huge land glaciers from a mere 20,000 years ago. This reduces the volume of the polar ice shelves, forcing sea level up in other places. So there is a background sea level rise that was ongoing before the industrial revolution.
However, the "still recovering from the ice age" is total nonsense regarding global mean temperature. Prior to 1900, global mean temperature peaked 6000 years ago and slowly declined since then.
Michael Tobis Ph.D. (Climatology, U Wisc Madison 1996)
OK, I can imagine the politics that made American Beauty a runaway Oscar favorite and the strangely similar, equally mind-bogglingly amazing, but much more stupidly promoted Eyes Wide Shut shunned.
What I don't understand is how come Kubrick wasn't even mentioned in the tribute to film folks who died last year. That's just bizarre.
I hope you will seriously reconsider your attempt to enforce your 1-click "technology". Patents of this sort damage the web. Damage to the web damages Amazon. Please think carefully.
I agree, the whole point is silly. The skill set needed for politics is orthogonal to the skill set needed for technical work. The alarming thing is that the skill set needed for politics is orthogonal to the skill set for government as well.
That's the problem - when democracy was invented there was no such profession as politics. Now that a political profession has arisen, government is run by politicians, not by statesmen. The skill set needed to be elected against professional competition is so specialized that there is no room left in the politician's life to learn anything sensible about government.
The statesman needs to communicate and to understand, while the politician needs to propagandize and oversimplify. True, the technical professional needs a little of each, but mostly we need to understand inanimate systems. Engineers and coders are not especially drawn from the same talent pool that either the existing political class or the hoped-for statesman class might be drawn from.
The way we can help is by providing tools to the world to sort through the one-sided garbage and get to the wierd multifaceted truth. Maybe the web can serve this purpose, and maybe our sort can help in that way.
It's hard to imagine the technical professional who'd make a good statesman, any more than the good politician makes a good statesman. I think it would be excellent if more of us devoted more of our efforts to the public good. That doesn't mean it makes sense to suggest that our failure to go into conventional politics is what's causing governance to slip ever further into futility.
What we can export from our culture is skepticism, inquiry, and a resistance to hype (despite our production of so much hype? or because of it?). We can help the public do a better job of not being bamboozled. On the other hand, our streaks of arrogance, self-righteousness, and eccentricity don't lend themselves to governance, so we shouldn't feel guilty about not running for the state assembly or such.
The graphs at that Canadian site are particularly inexcuseable - were they drawn freehand? For those of you who'd like to see a peer-reviewed graph of the recent global mean surface temperature (published in _Nature_, and showing confidence bounds) see this U Mass press release and especially this figure.
It is in fact true that around 1970 *some* climate scientists were voicing *some* concern about an ice age being about due. This was based mostly on statistical arguments. There was also an issue as to whether human particulate emissions might be hastening the trend. I won't burden this list with why these statistical arguments were quite weak. The press ran with this story, and most public libraries over 30 years old have a scare volume called "The Cooling", by L. Ponte, which tried to get the public in a panic about this.
Around 1980, physical arguments replaced handwaving. People started to do the numbers, and found that human greenhouse emission warming was likely to overwhelm human particulate emission cooling as well as natural cycles.
It is currently the overwhelming consensus among the relevant sciences that a doubling of background CO2 (expected in the next few decades) will amount to a disequilibrium of 4 watts per square meter heating at the surface, worldwide, until climate changes to restore the equilibrium.
The exact ways in which climate will change are the subject of the modeling efforts. Whether climate will change substantially is no longer an open question among actual scientists, though there are lots of paid flaks in lab coats, some showing up here at/. , happy to try to convince you otherwise.
All current evidence shows that the intuitive conclusion that an extra 4 watts at the surface will lead to warming at the surface is correct, though there is about a factor of 4 argument about the amplitude of the change. The serious discussion, were society capable of such a thing, ought to be about how much we care.
Finally, this is not a small perturbation. One simulation has the climate of southern Wisconsin in 2070 about equal to that of Oklahoma today. The simulations are crude guesses in some ways, but they are the best we can do. The rates of change envisioned are about an order of magnitude larger than those seen in nature.
That's the usual error about chaos. Chaotic behavior is predictable in the large, though not in the small. The family of possible trajectories is knowable, the exact trajectory is only predictable for a limited time. The exact trajectory in meteorology is "weather", and the family of possible trajectories with their statistics is called "climate". Putting it another way, while I can't tell you whether it will snow next Christmas (weather prediction) I can tell you it will be colder (at least hereabouts) than the following 4th of July. This story, by the way, is further confirmation for me that the Brits and the Germans are doing the serious work in climate research, though. What a nice idea! Kudos to the UK team for this idea. I'll be sending some cycles your way!
True enough, I don't have any objective way of knowing that anyone or anything is sentient other than myself.
On the one hand, though, I am safest presuming the sentience of entities that are most like myself. On the other, I am least confident presuming the sentience of entities created for the explicit purpose of mimicking sentient behavior.
Your example of tree shrews shows the typical confusion that is rampant in AI circles. I have no reason to believe that tree shrews do not have an experience. I believe that it is the general case that living mammals do have an experience. (I am very curious as to how far down the evolutionary ladder this having an experience of the world goes.)
Experience is not the same as language or reason. Most everyone agrees that housecats feel pain or pleasure, while Pentium processors running MS software do not, which in their case is a blessing, to be sure...
What AI successes to date seem to tell us is that language and reason can exist independent of sentience (by which I mean *having an experience of being in the world*), while lower mammals seem to tell us that sentience can exist independent of reason.
As I read in a.sig a long time ago (alas, attribution lost) "It's typical of people who think for a living to confuse thinking and living". But, because there is no objective measure of sentience, these are just hints.
When I build a simulation of the ocean, I do not think that it is wet. I could build a very fine CG rendering of ocean waves that would fool you, but they still couldn't dissolve real salt.
The very scary fallacy here is that you are claiming that because you have no way of knowing whether the ocean is real since you are constrained not to touch it, you *must* behave as if it were real.
The concern you might raise is that you have many reasons to believe that the Atlantic Ocean exists independent of your belief in its wetness while you know that my ocean was constructed for the explicit purpose of convincing you of its wetness.
Now, let's further suppose that wetness is the most fundamentally interesting property of the universe. Are you really willing to trifle with it on the basis of expensive parlor tricks?
The trifling little ego trip of passing the Turing Test is likely to be presented to some fool judge somewhere as an instance of a conscious life, born in some particular country and hence deserving of citizenship. All the "AI experts" will line up to testify on its behalf, while everyone with the sense to spend their time doing something productive will not be acknowledged as competent to testify.
I think it won't be long before this legally empowered monstrosity gets out of control. It could use its reporoductive rights to multithread itself to outvote the rest of us in no time. How many cycles per second, or per century, would an instance of the code need to run to be considered sentient, anyway?
Just because it can play chess doesn't mean it can enjoy itself, and a universe full of chess-playing bogus-feeling automata is not an implausible outcome of the urge to build an AI. This isn't a heroic quest, it's stupid and crazy beyond comprehension.
We don't know if consciousness is logical, chemical, quantum, or even in some sense supernatural. We can't know. We can't test the hypothesis. We can't know if a simulation of conscsiousness is conscious or not. Therefore we can't know whether it is deserving of rights. Therefore it is unethical to build it.
I hope the world sits up and takes notice soon. Alas, it sounds too silly for most people to take seriously. Unfortunately, there are some very smart people who adamantly insist on missing the point.
We dare not mess with replacing consciousness life because we don't know and can never know what consciousness is.
True enough, I don't have any objective way of knowing that anyone or anything is sentient other than myself. On the one hand, though, I am safest presuming the sentience of entities that are most like myself. On the other, I am least confident presuming the sentience of entities created for the explicit purpose of mimicking sentient behavior. Your example of tree shrews shows the typical confusion that is rampant in AI circles. I have no reason to believe that tree shrews do not have an experience. I believe that it is the general case that living mammals do have an experience. (I am very curious as to how far down the evolutionary ladder this having an experience of the world goes.) Experience is not the same as language or reason. Most everyone agrees that housecats feel pain or pleasure, while Pentium processors running MS software do not, which in their case is a blessing, to be sure... What AI successes to date seem to tell us is that language and reason can exist independent of sentience (by which I mean *having an experience of being in the world*), while lower mammals seem to tell us that sentience can exist independent of reason. As I read in a.sig a long time ago (alas, attribution lost) "It's typical of people who think for a living to confuse thinking and living". But, because there is no objective measure of sentience, these are just hints. When I build a simulation of the ocean, I do not think that it is wet. I could build a very fine CG rendering of ocean waves that would fool you, but they still couldn't dissolve real salt. The very scary fallacy here is that you are claiming that because you have no way of knowing whether the ocean is real since you are constrained not to touch it, you *must* behave as if it were real. The concern you might raise is that you have many reasons to believe that the Atlantic Ocean exists independent of your belief in its wetness while you know that my ocean was constructed for the explicit purpose of convincing you of its wetness. Now, let's further suppose that wetness is the most fundamentally interesting property of the universe. Are you really willing to trifle with it on the basis of expensive parlor tricks? The trifling little ego trip of passing the Turing Test is likely to be presented to some fool judge somewhere as an instance of a conscious life, born in some particular country and hence deserving of citizenship. All the "AI experts" will line up to testify on its behalf, while everyone with the sense to spend their time doing something productive will not be acknowledged as competent to testify. I think it won't be long before this legally empowered monstrosity gets out of control. It could use its reporoductive rights to multithread itself to outvote the rest of us in no time. How many cycles per second, or per century, would an instance of the code need to run to be considered sentient, anyway? Just because it can play chess doesn't mean it can enjoy itself, and a universe full of chess-playing bogus-feeling automata is not an implausible outcome of the urge to build an AI. This isn't a heroic quest, it's stupid and crazy beyond comprehension. We don't know if consciousness is logical, chemical, quantum, or even in some sense supernatural. We can't know. We can't test the hypothesis. We can't know if a simulation of conscsiousness is conscious or not. Therefore we can't know whether it is deserving of rights. Therefore it is unethical to build it. I hope the world sits up and takes notice soon. Alas, it sounds too silly for most people to take seriously. Unfortunately, there are some very smart people who adamantly insist on missing the point. We dare not mess with replacing consciousness life because we don't know and can never know what consciousness is.
We can never know and will never be certain whether we have created sentience.
Objectively decideable hypothesis require objectively observable phenomena. The presence or absence of a subjective experience is, obviously, a subjective rather than an objective phenomenon. Experience cannot be measured or objectively detected. Therefore its presence or absence is a scientifically undecideable question.
The ideas that humans will sooner or later, and possibly sooner, be replaced by automata is therefore enormously dangerous. By building simulations of subjective experience without verifiably creating subjective experience, we run the risk of replacing life, in the sense that it matters, with non-life.
We should be honest and admit that we have no way of knowing whether AI in fact can have an experience. We don't understand what experience is in the context of objective science, and we never will because experience is only detectable subjectively. This is why the so-called sciences of experience (psychology and AI) get so muddled at the most important point. They are reluctant to acknowledge that what they study and model is not actually objectively observable.
Therefore, by making the effort to build our successor species we have no way of knowing whether we are leaving out the most important ingredient. I agree that this issue is of enormous importance. I view it as a threat on a par with total war or an asteroid strike. It's not hard for me to imagine a world in which a bunch of machines act as if they had some sort of a culture and a sentient life, but in fact are just a bunch of overcomplicated toasters that have pointlessly and stupidly displaced actual living beings who can actually enjoy the toast.
Slashdot Mirror
The license terms are, in my reading, reasonable, but the use of the word "viral" in this context is inexcusable propaganda. Would it be possible to rewrite OS licenses such that Microsoft products were categorized as "Septic Software (as defined below in section 1.3.9.2 part c)"?
It's generally not a good idea to take historical fiction as history. I really enjoyed the TV series the Untouchables (90s version - alas, I was almost alone in this). Part of the amusement, though, is that Elliot Ness was portrayed as an earnest yuppie. I thought this was interesting, but I never went around saying, you know, yuppies were around before 1940 - look at Elliot Ness.
Whether or not most ADD has a biological component, there's no doubt at all that there's an environmental component. That's why there are environmental adaptations, right?
Your point, which is a straw man argument anyway, isn't particularly supported by your so-called evidence. Notice that I don't call you names about it, by the way.
Where do they even get these numbers? Are they tracking GETs at an ISP? Which one?
/.? 2) how do you get around sample bias?
I doubt these numbers mean anything for two reasons that haven't been mentioned yet: 1) time on a site is an ill-defined quantity - if I minimize Netscape and open emacs, am I still on
Bah.
There is no content shortage. There is a content surplus. There is an attention shortage. The consumer of content is a conscious intelligence, and each such consumer has a maximum of 24 hours per day of such attention to allocate to content.
Building content to expand to fill bandwidth will just result in bigger, faster and more extensive drivel. The content provider needs to focus on quality, and the network needs to find a way to pay for it.
http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc/
Easy, lightweight, quick HTML -> PDF .
Excellent point! Hope the lawyers for the good guys are taking notes - this one feels like something a judge or jury could understand.
The date of first use of the expression "operating system" is at least a well-defined quantity. Is it a known quantity? Who first described what they had as the "operating system", and when did it get abbreviated to "OS"?
Anyhow, for what it's worth, let me try to clarify the sea level thing. Melting sea ice has no effect on sea level (eureka!) because a floating object displaces exactly its weight of water. Melting glaciers and thermal expansion of water can cause sea level to increase. Both of these effects are basically inevitable in the coming century or two.
There's a countervailing phenomenon, which is that the snowfall onto the glacial landmasses (a.k.a. Greenland and Antarctica) is likely to increase under global warming, since warmer polar air can deliver more precipitation. This phenomenon would cause sea levels to drop. Best bets are that this phenomenon will be much smaller than the others, and sea level will rise gradually, unless there is a massive failure of a huge glacier.
The most likely candidate for that is the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which would be capable of raising sea level a few meters more or less abruptly if it were to slide into the ocean.
Now about the "still recovering from the ice age" thing, that's true about sea level, since the continents are still bouncing back from the weight of the huge land glaciers from a mere 20,000 years ago. This reduces the volume of the polar ice shelves, forcing sea level up in other places. So there is a background sea level rise that was ongoing before the industrial revolution.
However, the "still recovering from the ice age" is total nonsense regarding global mean temperature. Prior to 1900, global mean temperature peaked 6000 years ago and slowly declined since then.
Michael Tobis Ph.D. (Climatology, U Wisc Madison 1996)
OK, I can imagine the politics that made American Beauty a runaway Oscar favorite and the strangely similar, equally mind-bogglingly amazing, but much more stupidly promoted Eyes Wide Shut shunned.
What I don't understand is how come Kubrick wasn't even mentioned in the tribute to film folks who died last year. That's just bizarre.
I hope you will seriously reconsider your attempt to enforce your 1-click "technology". Patents of this sort damage the web. Damage to the web damages Amazon. Please think carefully.
I agree, the whole point is silly. The skill set needed for politics is orthogonal to the skill set needed for technical work. The alarming thing is that the skill set needed for politics is orthogonal to the skill set for government as well.
That's the problem - when democracy was invented there was no such profession as politics. Now that a political profession has arisen, government is run by politicians, not by statesmen. The skill set needed to be elected against professional competition is so specialized that there is no room left in the politician's life to learn anything sensible about government.
The statesman needs to communicate and to understand, while the politician needs to propagandize and oversimplify. True, the technical professional needs a little of each, but mostly we need to understand inanimate systems. Engineers and coders are not especially drawn from the same talent pool that either the existing political class or the hoped-for statesman class might be drawn from.
The way we can help is by providing tools to the world to sort through the one-sided garbage and get to the wierd multifaceted truth. Maybe the web can serve this purpose, and maybe our sort can help in that way.
It's hard to imagine the technical professional who'd make a good statesman, any more than the good politician makes a good statesman. I think it would be excellent if more of us devoted more of our efforts to the public good. That doesn't mean it makes sense to suggest that our failure to go into conventional politics is what's causing governance to slip ever further into futility.
What we can export from our culture is skepticism, inquiry, and a resistance to hype (despite our production of so much hype? or because of it?). We can help the public do a better job of not being bamboozled. On the other hand, our streaks of arrogance, self-righteousness, and eccentricity don't lend themselves to governance, so we shouldn't feel guilty about not running for the state assembly or such.
The graphs at that Canadian site are particularly inexcuseable - were they drawn freehand? For those of you who'd like to see a peer-reviewed graph of the recent global mean surface temperature (published in _Nature_, and showing confidence bounds) see this U Mass press release and especially this figure .
Around 1980, physical arguments replaced handwaving. People started to do the numbers, and found that human greenhouse emission warming was likely to overwhelm human particulate emission cooling as well as natural cycles.
It is currently the overwhelming consensus among the relevant sciences that a doubling of background CO2 (expected in the next few decades) will amount to a disequilibrium of 4 watts per square meter heating at the surface, worldwide, until climate changes to restore the equilibrium.
The exact ways in which climate will change are the subject of the modeling efforts. Whether climate will change substantially is no longer an open question among actual scientists, though there are lots of paid flaks in lab coats, some showing up here at
All current evidence shows that the intuitive conclusion that an extra 4 watts at the surface will lead to warming at the surface is correct, though there is about a factor of 4 argument about the amplitude of the change. The serious discussion, were society capable of such a thing, ought to be about how much we care.
Finally, this is not a small perturbation. One simulation has the climate of southern Wisconsin in 2070 about equal to that of Oklahoma today. The simulations are crude guesses in some ways, but they are the best we can do. The rates of change envisioned are about an order of magnitude larger than those seen in nature.
That's the usual error about chaos. Chaotic behavior is predictable in the large, though not in the small. The family of possible trajectories is knowable, the exact trajectory is only predictable for a limited time. The exact trajectory in meteorology is "weather", and the family of possible trajectories with their statistics is called "climate". Putting it another way, while I can't tell you whether it will snow next Christmas (weather prediction) I can tell you it will be colder (at least hereabouts) than the following 4th of July. This story, by the way, is further confirmation for me that the Brits and the Germans are doing the serious work in climate research, though. What a nice idea! Kudos to the UK team for this idea. I'll be sending some cycles your way!
oh foo, sorry about the formatting.
True enough, I don't have any objective way of knowing that anyone or anything is sentient other than myself.
On the one hand, though, I am safest presuming the sentience of entities that are most like myself. On the other, I am least confident presuming the sentience of entities created for the explicit purpose of mimicking sentient behavior.
Your example of tree shrews shows the typical confusion that is rampant in AI circles. I have no reason to believe that tree shrews do not have an experience. I believe that it is the general case that living mammals do have an experience. (I am very curious as to how far down the evolutionary ladder this having an experience of the world goes.)
Experience is not the same as language or reason. Most everyone agrees that housecats feel pain or pleasure, while Pentium processors running MS software do not, which in their case is a blessing, to be sure...
What AI successes to date seem to tell us is that language and reason can exist independent of sentience (by which I mean *having an experience of being in the world*), while lower mammals seem to tell us that sentience can exist independent of reason.
As I read in a .sig a long time ago (alas, attribution lost) "It's typical of people who think for a living to confuse thinking and living". But, because there is no objective measure of sentience, these are just hints.
When I build a simulation of the ocean, I do not think that it is wet. I could build a very fine CG rendering of ocean waves that would fool you, but they still couldn't dissolve real salt.
The very scary fallacy here is that you are claiming that because you have no way of knowing whether the ocean is real since you are constrained not to touch it, you *must* behave as if it were real.
The concern you might raise is that you have many reasons to believe that the Atlantic Ocean exists independent of your belief in its wetness while you know that my ocean was constructed for the explicit purpose of convincing you of its wetness.
Now, let's further suppose that wetness is the most fundamentally interesting property of the universe. Are you really willing to trifle with it on the basis of expensive parlor tricks?
The trifling little ego trip of passing the Turing Test is likely to be presented to some fool judge somewhere as an instance of a conscious life, born in some particular country and hence deserving of citizenship. All the "AI experts" will line up to testify on its behalf, while everyone with the sense to spend their time doing something productive will not be acknowledged as competent to testify.
I think it won't be long before this legally empowered monstrosity gets out of control. It could use its reporoductive rights to multithread itself to outvote the rest of us in no time. How many cycles per second, or per century, would an instance of the code need to run to be considered sentient, anyway?
Just because it can play chess doesn't mean it can enjoy itself, and a universe full of chess-playing bogus-feeling automata is not an implausible outcome of the urge to build an AI. This isn't a heroic quest, it's stupid and crazy beyond comprehension.
We don't know if consciousness is logical, chemical, quantum, or even in some sense supernatural. We can't know. We can't test the hypothesis. We can't know if a simulation of conscsiousness is conscious or not. Therefore we can't know whether it is deserving of rights. Therefore it is unethical to build it.
I hope the world sits up and takes notice soon. Alas, it sounds too silly for most people to take seriously. Unfortunately, there are some very smart people who adamantly insist on missing the point.
We dare not mess with replacing consciousness life because we don't know and can never know what consciousness is.
True enough, I don't have any objective way of knowing that anyone or anything is sentient other than myself. On the one hand, though, I am safest presuming the sentience of entities that are most like myself. On the other, I am least confident presuming the sentience of entities created for the explicit purpose of mimicking sentient behavior. Your example of tree shrews shows the typical confusion that is rampant in AI circles. I have no reason to believe that tree shrews do not have an experience. I believe that it is the general case that living mammals do have an experience. (I am very curious as to how far down the evolutionary ladder this having an experience of the world goes.) Experience is not the same as language or reason. Most everyone agrees that housecats feel pain or pleasure, while Pentium processors running MS software do not, which in their case is a blessing, to be sure... What AI successes to date seem to tell us is that language and reason can exist independent of sentience (by which I mean *having an experience of being in the world*), while lower mammals seem to tell us that sentience can exist independent of reason. As I read in a .sig a long time ago (alas, attribution lost) "It's typical of people who think for a living to confuse thinking and living". But, because there is no objective measure of sentience, these are just hints. When I build a simulation of the ocean, I do not think that it is wet. I could build a very fine CG rendering of ocean waves that would fool you, but they still couldn't dissolve real salt. The very scary fallacy here is that you are claiming that because you have no way of knowing whether the ocean is real since you are constrained not to touch it, you *must* behave as if it were real. The concern you might raise is that you have many reasons to believe that the Atlantic Ocean exists independent of your belief in its wetness while you know that my ocean was constructed for the explicit purpose of convincing you of its wetness. Now, let's further suppose that wetness is the most fundamentally interesting property of the universe. Are you really willing to trifle with it on the basis of expensive parlor tricks? The trifling little ego trip of passing the Turing Test is likely to be presented to some fool judge somewhere as an instance of a conscious life, born in some particular country and hence deserving of citizenship. All the "AI experts" will line up to testify on its behalf, while everyone with the sense to spend their time doing something productive will not be acknowledged as competent to testify. I think it won't be long before this legally empowered monstrosity gets out of control. It could use its reporoductive rights to multithread itself to outvote the rest of us in no time. How many cycles per second, or per century, would an instance of the code need to run to be considered sentient, anyway? Just because it can play chess doesn't mean it can enjoy itself, and a universe full of chess-playing bogus-feeling automata is not an implausible outcome of the urge to build an AI. This isn't a heroic quest, it's stupid and crazy beyond comprehension. We don't know if consciousness is logical, chemical, quantum, or even in some sense supernatural. We can't know. We can't test the hypothesis. We can't know if a simulation of conscsiousness is conscious or not. Therefore we can't know whether it is deserving of rights. Therefore it is unethical to build it. I hope the world sits up and takes notice soon. Alas, it sounds too silly for most people to take seriously. Unfortunately, there are some very smart people who adamantly insist on missing the point. We dare not mess with replacing consciousness life because we don't know and can never know what consciousness is.
We can never know and will never be certain whether we have created sentience.
Objectively decideable hypothesis require objectively observable phenomena. The presence or absence of a subjective experience is, obviously, a subjective rather than an objective phenomenon. Experience cannot be measured or objectively detected. Therefore its presence or absence is a scientifically undecideable question.
The ideas that humans will sooner or later, and possibly sooner, be replaced by automata is therefore enormously dangerous. By building simulations of subjective experience without verifiably creating subjective experience, we run the risk of replacing life, in the sense that it matters, with non-life.
We should be honest and admit that we have no way of knowing whether AI in fact can have an experience. We don't understand what experience is in the context of objective science, and we never will because experience is only detectable subjectively. This is why the so-called sciences of experience (psychology and AI) get so muddled at the most important point. They are reluctant to acknowledge that what they study and model is not actually objectively observable.
Therefore, by making the effort to build our successor species we have no way of knowing whether we are leaving out the most important ingredient. I agree that this issue is of enormous importance. I view it as a threat on a par with total war or an asteroid strike. It's not hard for me to imagine a world in which a bunch of machines act as if they had some sort of a culture and a sentient life, but in fact are just a bunch of overcomplicated toasters that have pointlessly and stupidly displaced actual living beings who can actually enjoy the toast.