A lot of what's being done in neural network tech today is analogous to human sensory perception, like vision and hearing. Just because the artificial neural net you're using today to predict stocks or the weather has zero potential to develop something like "emotion," doesn't mean that more human-like networks won't. Read Donald Norman's Emotional Design and Stephen Pinker's How the Mind Works, and get back to me.
An artificial signal processing neural network, like ones to process machine vision or machine hearing works very much like our own signal processing neural networks that perform the same functions in the brain. And they also work exactly the same way as the artificial neural networks which predict stock prices. So you think that a machine vision ANN is somehow holding some magical consciousness potential just because a similar process takes place in the brain? It's not. It's an algorithm like any other. No magic is involved. There is EXACTLY ONE reason to suggest that consciousness somehow emerges from neural networks, and that is that if you make that leap then you can pretend that you understand how and why the mind exists....all for the price of a little magical thinking.
It is being put together by a five member team of experts that includes futurists and a science fiction writer.
Oh, ok, as long as we have futurists AND science fiction writers working on this problem, then we are certainly in good hands...
A draft of the proposals said: "In the 21st Century humanity will coexist with the first alien intelligence we have ever come into contact with - robots."
Oh, really? Ok. You know, S Koreans, it's never too late to choose communism. Not everyone is cut out to deal with the leasure time that is inherent in a prosperous economic system.
it has been programmed to enjoy being raped... Is that ethical? Should this be permitted?
Yes, it should be permitted -- possibly even subsidized by the government. But then there should be secret death squads whose job it is to hunt down and kill everyone who orders one.
its neural net will need to be trained: rewarded positively when it gets things right, negatively when it gets things wrong. Emotion could potentially be an emergent phenominon from this kind of reward/punishment.
Oh yeah? As a developer of artificial neural networks (and all sorts of other software) I call BULLS**T! Your car is more likely to develop sentience/emotions from highway driving.
Frequency of waves doesn't change much, especially in the Atlantic. It varies a little more in the Pacific, because it is dependent on how far away the waves are coming from, and it's a much bigger ocean. Still not enough to be a problem. The consistency problem would be in amplitude. The Atlantic (at least on the US side) is flat for most of the summer, which is also when we consume the most power.
What should be done is tax incandescent bulbs so they are more expensive, and use the tax to discount the price of fluorescents. Then people are encouraged to make the "right" decision, but are not forced. The same thing should be done, IMHO, with many other things. For example, 2 liters of soda costs $1 but 1/2 gallon of real 100% juice costs like $3.
Nothing personal, but please take your fascism to California or Australia, so that it's there for when God strikes them down for their arrogance and sinks them into the sea. (Any day now, with a little luck.)
I think you are missing a very important point in your rant. In today's world, you eating that bacon while chugging a soda and smoking a Marlboro costs me money.
No, voting for socialized healthcare costs you money.
Now, it's almost the opposite way around; people perceive the light from incandescent bulbs as 'normal,' and bulbs that produce light that's actually similar to the big glowing thing outdoors as "cold" and "harsh."
There's more to light than its "temperature". There are no manmade light sources (for the consumer anyway) that are comparable to sunlight.
There is no such thing as a greyish tinge to light. In subtractive color theory, grey is made by adding black and white. In additive color theory, grey is just a dimmer white. It is not a tinge.
Ah, the old "you can't be percieving it that way; it's not in the theory for you to do so."
There is no way for anything to have a "pinkish/yellowish tinge." It could be one or the other, or it could be orange. Pink is desaturated red. Red and yellow make orange. Pink and yellow makes light orange.
Sure, if you're talking about setting the background color on your web page. With a lightsource that is a collection of narrow spectra some illuminated surfaces could look pinkish and others could look yellowish.
I'm just putting finishing touches on a computer simulation that clearly shows that the hum is caused by gasses produced by humans. Moreover, my simulation shows the hum literally ripping the planet in half in 50 years. I'd like to know where these other alleged researchers are getting their funding.
How about holding the opinion that my time on MySpace is worth just as much as your time on Google? I'm not a big MySpace user, but you are putting values to the way people spend their time. If your community feels that people shouldn't use library computers to get on MySpace, then campaign to make it a policy of your local library, but don't support some bill that will make it a requirement of every library. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean there isn't some community that only uses their libraries to access MySpace.
If the state is establishing and funding the libraries, then it is appropriate for the state to make such a law determining the legitimate purposes of the library.
Well, for one thing, we pay for public libraries. They are meant to provide a service for us. And if enough people are using public library computers to visit social sites, then clearly that's a service for which there is demand.
So??? If libraries sold LOTTO tickets, they would be in even MORE demand. However, what services the libraries should be there to provide is a question that should be decided by the people through their legislature.
I can tell you with certainty that there are people out there who don't have the money to buy a computer or pay for broadband. If a social site is valuable enough for YOU to use then it's of value to them as well. And, believe it or not, we build public libraries for poor people to use, too.
And since poor people can't afford prostitutes, I guess we should provide those at public libraries too. Seriously, it has nothing to do with the legitimacy of social networking sites, and LESS than nothing to do with anyone's fundamental rights. What it has to do with is what is an appropriate use of the taxpayer-owned assets at public libraries (and by extension, the appropriate use of libraries), as determined by the taxpayers' representatives in the legislature.
That's why there is absolutely nothing wrong with an individual library, or even a whole collective of librarians making such an edict - there should be restrictions on such limited public systems. The problem is that the legislature has no place making such laws.
The legislature establishes and funds the public libraries in the first place. Why on earth should they not then pass laws to define the acceptable range of services they should provide?
his bill proposes that public libraries, which are taxpayer-funded, should be compelled to restrict the information that their patrons are able to access. How is this not government censorship? You could make an argument for this for schools but not libraries.
The services provided by government schools and libraries are not the results of Constitutional mandates. They are the results of state legislatures deciding to provide certain services. What services those institutions provide (or in this case don't provide) are entirely up to the people's representitives. The idea that the government, by setting boundaries on the use of the free Internet service they provide, somehow violates the fundamental rights of those who would otherwise use that service for purposes that the People don't approve of, is nothing short of insane.
Umm what about adults? Dont we as an adult have a right to view what we want ( that is legal, not talking about kiddy porn or something like that here )? We can debate all day long about letting children have access to this stuff when a parent isnt around, but removing it from adults as well, who pay for the library with their taxes? Ummm something is a miss here.
This has absolutely nothing to do with what materials children or adults have a right to view. It has only to do with which services the government chooses to make available at libraries. Decisions about what sevices will be provided with taxpayer money are made by the taxpayers' representatives.
People like Al Gore and Richard Branson can't really be expected to understand actual science outside of what they are spoon-fed. They probably have no idea that the human race as we know it only thrives because of a completely unprecidented and unexplained stable warm period since the last ice age. (Previous interglacial periods were accompanied by strong temperature spikes, warmer than our current temperature; however the planet has never experienced anything like the sustained, near-constant high temperature of the last 15,000 years.) They probably don't realize that net ice loss will continue, and ocean level rises will continue, even with a constant global temperature -- and that short of starting down the slope of increasing glaciation, there is nothing that is going stop coastal cities from being threatened by the sea eventually.
To start the planet cooling means to bring about the exinction, or near extinction of the human race. So naturally the most logical thing for a Billionaire Genius to do is offer $25M to the first person who can remove AT LEAST a billion tons of CO2 per year from the atmosphere. While it would be the most appropriate thing it the world if we were to wipe out our species by our own arrogance, I for one don't want to see it happen.
This is classic asymetric warfare. It is how the US was beaten in Vietnam and it is how the US is likely to be beaten in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That might be good enough thinking for Democratic and Al Qaeda propaganda, but it doesn't even begin to stand up to scrutiny. In Viet Nam we were opposed by the northern half the country, with organized and highly-trained armies. The effectiveness of the tactics and abilities of the north, combined with the inadequate political permission to pursue the war, resulted in our inability to militarily take the northern half of that country.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, WE ALREADY WON THE WAR for control of the territory. We have military control both the ground and the air space. From this difference alone, there can be no sensible comparison with Viet Nam!
We completely defeated the Taliban. Recently, they've made a resurgence which we weren't anticipating, but we can shut that down the same way we shut them down the first time.
In Iraq (as in Afghanistan) the vast majority of the people across the nation are strongly in favor of the republican form of government they have voted for. This isn't to say that it's an easy situation, or that we necessarily have good solutions for ending the violence in baghdad. However, it is to say that comparisons with Viet Nam are just dishonest intellectual shortcuts to defeatism.
Wait, do we hate Bush because he's spending too much money on the war, or because he didn't finance it enough to let the troops do their job? I'm so confused!
You obviously don't have the makings of a good Democrat. You need to do a lot more hating and a lot less thinking.
the only device troops need to identify an "insurgent" (read: any person defending their homeland from an illegal foreign occupation) are their eyeballs. the vast majority of Iraqis (and Afghanis) want the US out of their country now (not to mention the vast majority of US troops want to be out now, along with the US public--so much for "democracy").
Oh, this is brilliant. First of all, all your facts are wrong. The actual facts are that vast majority of Iraqis (and Afghanis) want the US out of their country AS SOON AS PRACTICAL, but CERTAINLY NOT NOW. The vast majority of Iraqis (and Afghanis) are in favor of the Constitution that they ratified, and the republican government operating under it, meaning they are OPPOSED TO THE INSURGENCY. You are also quite confused about what the Insurgents are doing. They are waging a religious war on each other, and on the people and the government. But attack "the occupiers" is their last priority, and only done to score points with their constituents. The majority of US troops support the war, not oppose it. The majority of the US public wants the war to be over ASAP, but are not so foolish as to support immediate abandonment. But the point that is clear is that you have no concept of the meaning of democracy. The form of democracy practiced in the U.S. is the form of republicanism proscribed by our constitution. Under this form, the people elect a President every four years, and this President commands the armed forces -- as opposed to the people commanding the armed forces by popular poll, or the armed forces commanding themselves by popular poll.
So, tell me again how the dems managed to cause this problem when they were utterly out of power for the last for the last decade. Oh, and for the last six years the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress with enough votes to pass anything other than mandatory baby sacrifices and had a president that would sign any bill sent to him?
First of all, you are completely mischaractorizing the situation. For the past decade the Republicans have never had anything beyond a bare majority in the Senate. Without a 60-40 majority, the minority can block any legislation it cares to.
Second of all, it is the Democrats, not the Republicans who are for mandatory baby sacrifices.
Something tells me that if we drafted the appropriate industries to build a *REAL* military industrial complex, and punished profiteering adequately in the first place, our troops could have had this technology (instead of a stupid deck of playing cards) in 2002, instead of waiting until 2007 for it to be delivered. But since Bush doesn't want to impact the profitability of this war, we have to wait for a significantly patriotic David to identify who the enemy is. It's exactly this lack of vision that has turned Afghanistan back into a Taliban-controlled country and destroyed our success in Iraq.
You have it completely backwards. It is free enterprise that can move with agility and innovate, and which has done so in this case. And it is the overwhelming regulation required with any complex Federally controlled enterprise which strangles it. So, no, the idea that some fascist, command-economy, profit-punishing, military-industrial complex would out-innovate what we have now, is COMPLETELY NUTS.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, yeah? What do you think kept it from developing consciousness? Not enough nodes?
An artificial signal processing neural network, like ones to process machine vision or machine hearing works very much like our own signal processing neural networks that perform the same functions in the brain. And they also work exactly the same way as the artificial neural networks which predict stock prices. So you think that a machine vision ANN is somehow holding some magical consciousness potential just because a similar process takes place in the brain? It's not. It's an algorithm like any other. No magic is involved. There is EXACTLY ONE reason to suggest that consciousness somehow emerges from neural networks, and that is that if you make that leap then you can pretend that you understand how and why the mind exists.
Oh, ok, as long as we have futurists AND science fiction writers working on this problem, then we are certainly in good hands...
Oh, really? Ok. You know, S Koreans, it's never too late to choose communism. Not everyone is cut out to deal with the leasure time that is inherent in a prosperous economic system.
Yes, it should be permitted -- possibly even subsidized by the government. But then there should be secret death squads whose job it is to hunt down and kill everyone who orders one.
Oh yeah? As a developer of artificial neural networks (and all sorts of other software) I call BULLS**T! Your car is more likely to develop sentience/emotions from highway driving.
Frequency of waves doesn't change much, especially in the Atlantic. It varies a little more in the Pacific, because it is dependent on how far away the waves are coming from, and it's a much bigger ocean. Still not enough to be a problem. The consistency problem would be in amplitude. The Atlantic (at least on the US side) is flat for most of the summer, which is also when we consume the most power.
I'm sorry, but they are not detecting the signatures of INDIVIDUAL MOLECULES. Try "individual compounds".
Nothing personal, but please take your fascism to California or Australia, so that it's there for when God strikes them down for their arrogance and sinks them into the sea. (Any day now, with a little luck.)
No, voting for socialized healthcare costs you money.
There's more to light than its "temperature". There are no manmade light sources (for the consumer anyway) that are comparable to sunlight.
Ah, the old "you can't be percieving it that way; it's not in the theory for you to do so."
Sure, if you're talking about setting the background color on your web page. With a lightsource that is a collection of narrow spectra some illuminated surfaces could look pinkish and others could look yellowish.
I'm just putting finishing touches on a computer simulation that clearly shows that the hum is caused by gasses produced by humans. Moreover, my simulation shows the hum literally ripping the planet in half in 50 years. I'd like to know where these other alleged researchers are getting their funding.
If the state is establishing and funding the libraries, then it is appropriate for the state to make such a law determining the legitimate purposes of the library.
So??? If libraries sold LOTTO tickets, they would be in even MORE demand. However, what services the libraries should be there to provide is a question that should be decided by the people through their legislature.
And since poor people can't afford prostitutes, I guess we should provide those at public libraries too. Seriously, it has nothing to do with the legitimacy of social networking sites, and LESS than nothing to do with anyone's fundamental rights. What it has to do with is what is an appropriate use of the taxpayer-owned assets at public libraries (and by extension, the appropriate use of libraries), as determined by the taxpayers' representatives in the legislature.
The legislature establishes and funds the public libraries in the first place. Why on earth should they not then pass laws to define the acceptable range of services they should provide?
The services provided by government schools and libraries are not the results of Constitutional mandates. They are the results of state legislatures deciding to provide certain services. What services those institutions provide (or in this case don't provide) are entirely up to the people's representitives. The idea that the government, by setting boundaries on the use of the free Internet service they provide, somehow violates the fundamental rights of those who would otherwise use that service for purposes that the People don't approve of, is nothing short of insane.
This has absolutely nothing to do with what materials children or adults have a right to view. It has only to do with which services the government chooses to make available at libraries. Decisions about what sevices will be provided with taxpayer money are made by the taxpayers' representatives.
People like Al Gore and Richard Branson can't really be expected to understand actual science outside of what they are spoon-fed. They probably have no idea that the human race as we know it only thrives because of a completely unprecidented and unexplained stable warm period since the last ice age. (Previous interglacial periods were accompanied by strong temperature spikes, warmer than our current temperature; however the planet has never experienced anything like the sustained, near-constant high temperature of the last 15,000 years.) They probably don't realize that net ice loss will continue, and ocean level rises will continue, even with a constant global temperature -- and that short of starting down the slope of increasing glaciation, there is nothing that is going stop coastal cities from being threatened by the sea eventually.
To start the planet cooling means to bring about the exinction, or near extinction of the human race. So naturally the most logical thing for a Billionaire Genius to do is offer $25M to the first person who can remove AT LEAST a billion tons of CO2 per year from the atmosphere. While it would be the most appropriate thing it the world if we were to wipe out our species by our own arrogance, I for one don't want to see it happen.
I don't know which is worse, your ignorance or your arrogance.
That might be good enough thinking for Democratic and Al Qaeda propaganda, but it doesn't even begin to stand up to scrutiny. In Viet Nam we were opposed by the northern half the country, with organized and highly-trained armies. The effectiveness of the tactics and abilities of the north, combined with the inadequate political permission to pursue the war, resulted in our inability to militarily take the northern half of that country.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, WE ALREADY WON THE WAR for control of the territory. We have military control both the ground and the air space. From this difference alone, there can be no sensible comparison with Viet Nam!
We completely defeated the Taliban. Recently, they've made a resurgence which we weren't anticipating, but we can shut that down the same way we shut them down the first time.
In Iraq (as in Afghanistan) the vast majority of the people across the nation are strongly in favor of the republican form of government they have voted for. This isn't to say that it's an easy situation, or that we necessarily have good solutions for ending the violence in baghdad. However, it is to say that comparisons with Viet Nam are just dishonest intellectual shortcuts to defeatism.
You obviously don't have the makings of a good Democrat. You need to do a lot more hating and a lot less thinking.
Sounds like a bargain!
**APPROVED**
Oh, this is brilliant. First of all, all your facts are wrong. The actual facts are that vast majority of Iraqis (and Afghanis) want the US out of their country AS SOON AS PRACTICAL, but CERTAINLY NOT NOW. The vast majority of Iraqis (and Afghanis) are in favor of the Constitution that they ratified, and the republican government operating under it, meaning they are OPPOSED TO THE INSURGENCY. You are also quite confused about what the Insurgents are doing. They are waging a religious war on each other, and on the people and the government. But attack "the occupiers" is their last priority, and only done to score points with their constituents. The majority of US troops support the war, not oppose it. The majority of the US public wants the war to be over ASAP, but are not so foolish as to support immediate abandonment. But the point that is clear is that you have no concept of the meaning of democracy. The form of democracy practiced in the U.S. is the form of republicanism proscribed by our constitution. Under this form, the people elect a President every four years, and this President commands the armed forces -- as opposed to the people commanding the armed forces by popular poll, or the armed forces commanding themselves by popular poll.
First of all, you are completely mischaractorizing the situation. For the past decade the Republicans have never had anything beyond a bare majority in the Senate. Without a 60-40 majority, the minority can block any legislation it cares to.
Second of all, it is the Democrats, not the Republicans who are for mandatory baby sacrifices.
You have it completely backwards. It is free enterprise that can move with agility and innovate, and which has done so in this case. And it is the overwhelming regulation required with any complex Federally controlled enterprise which strangles it. So, no, the idea that some fascist, command-economy, profit-punishing, military-industrial complex would out-innovate what we have now, is COMPLETELY NUTS.