But it's hard to see how a complex culture could develop without speech.
However, some recent research has claimed that some of the great apes posess the rudiments of culture, in that genetically homogenous groups that are from different regions perform the same task (for instance gathering a particular type of food) in different ways. Another (artificial) example of a rudimentary "culture" was some monkeys (forget where) that were tempted into the water by food thrown into it, and subsequently learned to swim. In addition, they also grew to like the taste of the added salt from the water on their food, and started to take the food they gathered themselves and dip it in the salty water to flavour it - something not seen previously. They have continued to do so long after the original stimulus disappeared.
Now, I'm not claiming that this is anything remotely approaching the complexity of human cultures, but it is interesting nonetheless.
I'm a member of Melbourne Wireless, which is trying to build a citywide wireless community network. Australian regulations make it unclear whether what the group was doing was legal, and even if it was there were several groups associated with the telcos who seemed to have an agenda to make it illegal.
To cut a long story short, the group wrote a submission to a parliamentary inquiry on broadband technologies, and then spoke to that submission. The politicians (from both major parties) asked reasonable questions, and once they got their answers their comments were highly positive, saying that they believed what the group is doing was legal, and they would support continued free access to the requisite spectrum.
Now, I'm not saying that all the group's potential legal pitfalls were solved with one enquiry submission, but the basic point is that politicians will listen, if you talk to them the right way.
Notice I said "potentially". And, yes, the possibility of being reduced to irrelevancies, or just wiped out by our creations, is at least worth a little bit of thought experimentation.
In any case, my main point was that we'll have a lot more things to think about than Natalie Portman's career opportunities if AI succeeds:)
*Everything* changes in far more fundamental ways than just replacing Cameron Diaz. It potentially makes everyone from burger-flippers to Stephen Hawking redundant, particularly if you use these sentient computers to design the next generation of sentient computers...
So, whilst I don't disagree with your analysis of what would happen to the creative arts, take the blinkers off. See the wider impact if your belief that sentient AI will become commonplace turns out to be correct.
Re:Yes, but where are the flying cars?
on
The Future in Gear
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· Score: 2
Aside from the Moller skycar (the ultimate in vapourware at this stage), Popular Science recently had an article about a personal helicopter that used two contra-rotating blades stacked on top of each other, so you don't need a tail rotor and the controls are *much* easier and simpler. Even better, they actually saw the prototype fly:)
Ease of prediction depends on product
on
The Future in Gear
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· Score: 2
Some of these gadgets do essentially the same task as existing products, but promise to be better and more cost-effective - for instance, the solar cells and the micro-fuel cell. In each case, they are pretty much a direct replacement for existing gadgets for which there is a known demand (existing solar cells and batteries respectively) and, if they work, are virtually guaranteed to at least take over large parts of the existing market if they deliver technically.
Others, say the robots, are not direct replacements of existing technology, and it's predicting their success or failure is not just a matter of their technical success.
Weren't the price rises that caused those petrol strikes the responsibility of the market price of oil going up due to the actions of that wonderful cartel OPEC, rather than any action of the UK government?
If that's the case, WTF is the government supposed to do about it? Lower fuel taxes when its own costs are going to go up (cos the government has to buy fuel too)?
According to the article, southern hemisphere won't see much. But, then again, most of the people who live in the northern hemisphere live in such densely-populated light-polluted ratholes they won't see much anyway;)
You might make it theoretically possible, but you're not helping much. Consider, say, a machine with 64 kilobytes of RAM and no other state (no registers, no disk etc) - in other words, a very minimal system by today's standards. That gives us 524,288 bits of state, and thus 2^524,288 states.
Your worst case performance is going to be rather crappy:)
Chess-playing research seems to be a dead end
on
Men vs. Machines
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· Score: 3, Interesting
In the early days of AI research, it was believed that building chess-playing machines might give an insight into how to construct more general problem-solving tools.
That hasn't turned out to be the case. The search algorithms that the chess-playing programs use don't appear to be any great use for anything except playing chess (or closely related games like go or checkers).
Personally, I want to see a computer kick Kasparov's and Kramnik's ass (though I'm unconvinced it's going to happen this time around, it certainly will eventually) so that chess players shut up about defending the honor of humanity or some such rubbish. Knowing a little about how chess-playing programs work, I feel about as threatened by the prospect that the world chess champion can be trounced by a computer than the fact that in one second the PC I'm typing this at can do more arithmetic operations than I'll do in a lifetime.
Well, there are things that are definitely outside polynomial time - the halting problem for instance, which is undecidable no matter how much time you have. There are also problems that provably take exponential time even on a nondeterministic Turing machine. However, you are quite correct that TSP or SAT just might be in P (but it's pretty damn unlikely).
I was trying to keep it simple because the original poster said that he didn't know anything about theoretical CS.
Uh, no. Just because you can tell whether a number is prime in polynomial time, doesn't mean you can find the factors of a number in polynomial time, as I understand it.
The technical definition is kinda long and complex, but in essence it's like this. Given a problem of some size n, a polynomial time algorithm is guaranteed to give a solution in time proportional to a polynomial of n. If a polynomial-time algorithm exists that solves a problem, then the problem is said to be in polynomial time.
To give an example, say you've got a list of numbers and you want to know the sum. That can be done in linear time - ie, the time taken is proportional to the length of the list of numbers. The size of the problem (n) is defined by the length of the list and the time taken (T) is as follows: T = c1 * n + c0, where c1 and c0 are some fixed constants. The formula for T is a polynomial, and so the problem "LIST-SUM" is in polynomial time. It would still be in polynomial time if the formula for T was a polynomial with n^2, n^3, n^50 terms in it, or even terms like n^1.5 (because as n grows very large an n^1.5 term will always be smaller than an n^2 term).
Showing you an example of something outside polynomial time is a little more difficult, but some standard examples are SAT (the satisfiability problem) or the travelling-salesman problem, which you can read about in any book on the subject.
Amongst other things, scheduled transactions are in CVS now. A fair bit of the development has been on business features rather than personal financial management gloss though, AFAIK (I'm no longer directly involved - I have a thesis to do:).
Just for clarification, the company you refer to is different. You're right though, it's iffy, but for military logistics the arguments seem pretty compelling to me if the costs hold up.
As was discussed in the slashdot writeup, there have been serious proposals for transport airships for some time now. This British company is proposing 1000-tonne capacity cargo airships.
This kind of cargo airship would be very large, take a long time to get anywhere, and would probably fly much, much lower than a plane. Trying to keep its existence secret would be a substantial challenge to say the least.
So, given the non-secretness of the whole idea of a big cargo airship, the difficulty of keeping one secret if it existed, and the fact that the exact capabilities of a transport aircraft aren't generally the most important things to keep secret anyway, why bother?
This story discusses an Australian shoe company putting up sexually provocative billboards in the expectation of provoking complaints from the various wowser groups and thus getting themselves a bunch of free publicity. Cheap and effective.
OK, it's hardly the most evil thing anyone's ever done in the name of capitalism, but it's still a little disquieting.
For a start, it's a new realm for marketers to explore that's previously been mostly advertising-free. Marketing has been getting more and more pervasive lately, and the intellectual effort filtering it out becomes tiresome.
It's dishonest, in that it's not disclosed that these people are advertising a product. Undisclosed advertising has gotten lots of people in trouble lately (merchant banks providing "investment advice", pseudo-payola on US commercial radio, and a case a couple of years ago in Australia where a talkback broadcaster basically shook down the major banks for several hundred thousand dollars to stop making negative comments about them and start shilling for them).
If the product is really that good, why don't these people put Sony Ericsson T-shirts on and do the demos? If the product is actually some or all of cool, useful and good value, it will sell. If it's not, it won't, regardless of how much marketing effort is applied.
As has been discussed previously on this site, us Aussies pay on the order of 0.15 AUD (0.08 USD or so) per megabyte for downloads.
Nobody's intending to share their internet connections for free here. Instead, people are going to build citywide (and eventually nationwide) wireless networks.
C has one very good feature for writing secure software, namely that it's comparatively easy to figure out exactly what your program is doing, compared to C++ (where simply creating an automatic variable can invoke all sorts of constructor weirdness), let alone interpreted languages.
Talking to a guy who writes security software based on OpenBSD (and works on OpenBSD in his spare time), that's why he preferred to use C (in very small programs, containing only the bits of code that absolutely had to run as root and using some form of interprocess communication to talk to the bells-and-whistles provision daemon) for security-critical daemons.
I see this quoted again and again and again, but it's just horribly misleading.
Firstly, gun ownership in urban Australia has *always* been quite low, and pistols are extremely rare (except for police and security guards who carry them whilst at work). It is unheard of for women to carry guns for self-defence here, and always has been. Additionally, the definition of self-defence justifying the use of deadly force is much narrower here. So, the changing of gun laws had virtually no effect on the risk a criminal was taking when committing a crime.
Very few offences committed against "ordinary people" (muggings, burglaries, rapes etc) involved criminals with firearms. The career crooks have them, but they very rarely attack "civilians".
Violent crime rates have been largely steady over the past few years. Property crime went up over the last couple, basically because of an explosion of heroin availability which had nothing to do with guns.
And, finally, I've noticed that yanks don't like being told what to do by foriegners who don't understand their culture and the actual situation on the ground. Guess what? We feel the same. We like our current gun laws just fine, and don't appreciate the NRA funding loony friggin' shooters parties.
What the original poster claiming "there is no left wing in the United States" probably meant was that political positions equivalent to the mainstream European left simply aren't represented in US politics anywhere, and the battleground in US politics is between what in Europe would be the centre-right (the Democrats) and the far right (the republicans). There is a fair degree of truth in that assessment (though it is a great oversimplification).
In any case, simple polarisation of political views along a left-right divide is a nonsense and an unfortunate artifact of two-party systems.
Although occasionally LWN made wrong calls on things (name a news outlet that doesn't), their quality writing and analysis will be missed.
I suppose I should have supported their site with some cash, but there's only so many sites one can subscribe to with limited resources (I'm a subscriber at Salon and Crikey.com.au, amongst others).
Hopefully one day the web ad market will come back just a teency bit to help support good sites like LWN.
Earliest cars actually used unleaded
on
AMD's 64-Bit Chip
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· Score: 1
Leaded gasoline was only developed in the 1930's, IIRC...
Slashdot Mirror
However, some recent research has claimed that some of the great apes posess the rudiments of culture, in that genetically homogenous groups that are from different regions perform the same task (for instance gathering a particular type of food) in different ways. Another (artificial) example of a rudimentary "culture" was some monkeys (forget where) that were tempted into the water by food thrown into it, and subsequently learned to swim. In addition, they also grew to like the taste of the added salt from the water on their food, and started to take the food they gathered themselves and dip it in the salty water to flavour it - something not seen previously. They have continued to do so long after the original stimulus disappeared.
Now, I'm not claiming that this is anything remotely approaching the complexity of human cultures, but it is interesting nonetheless.
To cut a long story short, the group wrote a submission to a parliamentary inquiry on broadband technologies, and then spoke to that submission. The politicians (from both major parties) asked reasonable questions, and once they got their answers their comments were highly positive, saying that they believed what the group is doing was legal, and they would support continued free access to the requisite spectrum.
Now, I'm not saying that all the group's potential legal pitfalls were solved with one enquiry submission, but the basic point is that politicians will listen, if you talk to them the right way.
In any case, my main point was that we'll have a lot more things to think about than Natalie Portman's career opportunities if AI succeeds :)
So, whilst I don't disagree with your analysis of what would happen to the creative arts, take the blinkers off. See the wider impact if your belief that sentient AI will become commonplace turns out to be correct.
Aside from the Moller skycar (the ultimate in vapourware at this stage), Popular Science recently had an article about a personal helicopter that used two contra-rotating blades stacked on top of each other, so you don't need a tail rotor and the controls are *much* easier and simpler. Even better, they actually saw the prototype fly :)
Others, say the robots, are not direct replacements of existing technology, and it's predicting their success or failure is not just a matter of their technical success.
At least, that's my understanding.
If that's the case, WTF is the government supposed to do about it? Lower fuel taxes when its own costs are going to go up (cos the government has to buy fuel too)?
According to the article, southern hemisphere won't see much. But, then again, most of the people who live in the northern hemisphere live in such densely-populated light-polluted ratholes they won't see much anyway ;)
Your worst case performance is going to be rather crappy :)
That hasn't turned out to be the case. The search algorithms that the chess-playing programs use don't appear to be any great use for anything except playing chess (or closely related games like go or checkers).
Personally, I want to see a computer kick Kasparov's and Kramnik's ass (though I'm unconvinced it's going to happen this time around, it certainly will eventually) so that chess players shut up about defending the honor of humanity or some such rubbish. Knowing a little about how chess-playing programs work, I feel about as threatened by the prospect that the world chess champion can be trounced by a computer than the fact that in one second the PC I'm typing this at can do more arithmetic operations than I'll do in a lifetime.
I was trying to keep it simple because the original poster said that he didn't know anything about theoretical CS.
Uh, no. Just because you can tell whether a number is prime in polynomial time, doesn't mean you can find the factors of a number in polynomial time, as I understand it.
To give an example, say you've got a list of numbers and you want to know the sum. That can be done in linear time - ie, the time taken is proportional to the length of the list of numbers. The size of the problem (n) is defined by the length of the list and the time taken (T) is as follows: T = c1 * n + c0, where c1 and c0 are some fixed constants. The formula for T is a polynomial, and so the problem "LIST-SUM" is in polynomial time. It would still be in polynomial time if the formula for T was a polynomial with n^2, n^3, n^50 terms in it, or even terms like n^1.5 (because as n grows very large an n^1.5 term will always be smaller than an n^2 term).
Showing you an example of something outside polynomial time is a little more difficult, but some standard examples are SAT (the satisfiability problem) or the travelling-salesman problem, which you can read about in any book on the subject.
Amongst other things, scheduled transactions are in CVS now. A fair bit of the development has been on business features rather than personal financial management gloss though, AFAIK (I'm no longer directly involved - I have a thesis to do :).
Just for clarification, the company you refer to is different. You're right though, it's iffy, but for military logistics the arguments seem pretty compelling to me if the costs hold up.
This kind of cargo airship would be very large, take a long time to get anywhere, and would probably fly much, much lower than a plane. Trying to keep its existence secret would be a substantial challenge to say the least.
So, given the non-secretness of the whole idea of a big cargo airship, the difficulty of keeping one secret if it existed, and the fact that the exact capabilities of a transport aircraft aren't generally the most important things to keep secret anyway, why bother?
This story discusses an Australian shoe company putting up sexually provocative billboards in the expectation of provoking complaints from the various wowser groups and thus getting themselves a bunch of free publicity. Cheap and effective.
Taking out the battery until you get home?
For a start, it's a new realm for marketers to explore that's previously been mostly advertising-free. Marketing has been getting more and more pervasive lately, and the intellectual effort filtering it out becomes tiresome.
It's dishonest, in that it's not disclosed that these people are advertising a product. Undisclosed advertising has gotten lots of people in trouble lately (merchant banks providing "investment advice", pseudo-payola on US commercial radio, and a case a couple of years ago in Australia where a talkback broadcaster basically shook down the major banks for several hundred thousand dollars to stop making negative comments about them and start shilling for them).
If the product is really that good, why don't these people put Sony Ericsson T-shirts on and do the demos? If the product is actually some or all of cool, useful and good value, it will sell. If it's not, it won't, regardless of how much marketing effort is applied.
Nobody's intending to share their internet connections for free here. Instead, people are going to build citywide (and eventually nationwide) wireless networks.
Talking to a guy who writes security software based on OpenBSD (and works on OpenBSD in his spare time), that's why he preferred to use C (in very small programs, containing only the bits of code that absolutely had to run as root and using some form of interprocess communication to talk to the bells-and-whistles provision daemon) for security-critical daemons.
Firstly, gun ownership in urban Australia has *always* been quite low, and pistols are extremely rare (except for police and security guards who carry them whilst at work). It is unheard of for women to carry guns for self-defence here, and always has been. Additionally, the definition of self-defence justifying the use of deadly force is much narrower here. So, the changing of gun laws had virtually no effect on the risk a criminal was taking when committing a crime.
Very few offences committed against "ordinary people" (muggings, burglaries, rapes etc) involved criminals with firearms. The career crooks have them, but they very rarely attack "civilians".
Violent crime rates have been largely steady over the past few years. Property crime went up over the last couple, basically because of an explosion of heroin availability which had nothing to do with guns.
And, finally, I've noticed that yanks don't like being told what to do by foriegners who don't understand their culture and the actual situation on the ground. Guess what? We feel the same. We like our current gun laws just fine, and don't appreciate the NRA funding loony friggin' shooters parties.
In any case, simple polarisation of political views along a left-right divide is a nonsense and an unfortunate artifact of two-party systems.
I suppose I should have supported their site with some cash, but there's only so many sites one can subscribe to with limited resources (I'm a subscriber at Salon and Crikey.com.au, amongst others).
Hopefully one day the web ad market will come back just a teency bit to help support good sites like LWN.
Leaded gasoline was only developed in the 1930's, IIRC...