And there you have demonstrated that you have no clue how Science works. "Nature did it with meat" has no scientific basis. All Science has is interface observations. And even a child these days knows that what you can observe on the outside of a box is not necessarily created on the inside.
Seriously, stop pretending your anti-science quasi-religious fundamentalist beliefs are science. They are not.
You seem to be unaware of the definition of "magic". Makes you look pretty dumb.... Also, you basically seem to imply that consciousness is an "emergent property" of complexity (because Physics sure does not have a mechanism for it), and that means you do not understand Physics at all.
You also seem to be lacking the basic knowledge required to actually understand the references you gave. They do not say what you think they say...
This is just marketing BS and people deciding about scientific funding are not immune to it. So "automation" and "statistical classification" became "weak AI" and sometimes just AI (even though there is not even a hint of "I" in this type of "AI"). "Classifier parametrization" became "machine learning" (learning requires insight, none of that is to be had here though). There are numerous other atrocities against language and reason, all perpetrated to make things sound grand and to get more money.
As to strong AI, I think we now have collected ample evidence that either our grasp of Physics is fundamentally incomplete, or that purely physical constructs cannot be intelligent. And "replicating a mammalian brain"? That will not be within the grasp of humanity for thousands of years and likely never. You massively underestimate the complexity needed.
Likely he is not right either, because AI beyond statistical classification ("weak AI") may well be impossible, but trying new things is at the core of actual research. Although other approaches have been used in other fields and have failed to produce any hint of intelligence as well. For example automated theorem proving found that it cannot really be used to _find_ theorems, because the universe is a bit too small and short-lived to build the machinery for that. It is a very good tools in verifying tools though that humans have found, even if humans need to help it along with that too.
In that world we would not have racists, because racism is just a mechanism of losers to claim "I am better than those others because they have race characteristic XYZ, but I do not". Listen to some black racists some time and the utter stupidity of the racist idea becomes glaringly obvious.
These are established definitions. There is nothing "odd" about them.
But just to give you an intuition: Weak AI cannot plan, cannot judge, cannot explore and cannot in fact do anything that requires "initiative", "insight" or "understanding". It can just, given a large set of example decisions that share strong statistical characteristics, perform more of the same decisions so that they are similar to the decisions it got as input. In some cases this is enough to fake intelligence to a degree, but there is absolutely no intelligence in there.
"Strong AI" would be able to come up with goals, find out how previously unknown tasks can be divided into smaller tasks, can design experiments, etc.
In a sense, weak AI cannot do any of the things commonly associated with intelligence, but it can fake some of them under some circumstances. This fools many people that are only able to judge a thing by its outer form, but fail to understand inner workings. These people then believe things like pattern recognition of known patterns, sorting things according to known criteria, finding clusters along parameter axes, etc. are feats of intelligence. None of them are. They can be performed by mindless dumb algorithms. The only thing weak AI has going for it is that statistical classifiers are cheaper to build and parameterize than traditional algorithms for some problems, because you do not need to build an accurate model first. They cannot actually do more though than dumb classical algorithms and that can be mathematically demonstrated.
If you want to know more, I recommend spending a year or several with actual research literature. This is not some mystical BS definition, this is a hard, scientifically sound distinction.
I mean a real strong AI is an entity that is sentient.
That is unclear at this time. Sure, we only observe "strong intelligence" in connection with self-awareness and free will, so it seems reasonable that these are aspects of the same thing, but there is actually no scientific evidence either way. And there are a few problems both with free will and self-awareness. For one thing, there is absolutely no mechanism for self-awareness in Physics. It seems to be an extra-physical thing. In Physics, the whole is not and cannot be more than the sum of its parts. There are really only two ways out of this: a) Physics is grossly incomplete as known to us at this time and b) some dualist notion of a "soul" that provides the capability for self-awareness, insight and intuition (does not require religious bullshit). A pretty similar problem applies with free will.
Note that even if humans do it by way of a "soul", that would still not necessarily preclude purely mechanical intelligence. However that there is not even a theory after half a century of AI research how actual intelligence could be implemented with the physical limitations this universe has is a pretty strong hint that something extra is critically required.
My guess would be Google actually just is using some weak AI mechanisms and they did not feed in a list of things that are "forbidden". Does say bad things about some of their customers, but the world is full of idiots and _that_ cannot be fixed.
You are advocating censorship and propaganda. These are universally abused as soon as established and far worse than having stupid people think stupid things on their own. The only think we can to without making matters much worse is to be resilient as a society and tolerate the idiots. Any attempt at suppression is not only futile, but dangerous.
Google is profiting from what people want. If you force them to censor, you are banning things. While this state of affairs is not good, the proposed "cure" is far worse.
Caveat: I do think Google is an evil large corporation these days, but that is the normal state of things in capitalism. (No, communism is even worse, there you have an evil, all-encompassing state.)
Indeed. And it validates those ideas and the people that have them by the "David vs. Goliath" effect. (Works something like this: "They have to suppress the idea. Hence the idea must have merit, because otherwise they would have actual arguments against it and would not need to suppress it.)
But the cave-man reflex is to apply violence to anything they not not like, in modern times by proxy of the big fetish of "the law". This routinely makes matters much worse.
Actually, people find out about racism all by themselves. It is one of the common ways to of fuckups to elevate themselves above others. Fuckups that are still kids do discover it all by themselves. The idea is pretty simple and obvious: Identify some characteristic somebody else has that they cannot do anything about and are not actually responsible for and that you yourself do not have. Then attach negative meaning to it.
In particular the bad functionality of Google is utterly pathetic. You often have to comb through a lot of search results until you find something meaningful. Add to that that they basically killed the competition and Google is responsible for a massive dumbing-down. By now they are holding people back as badly as Microsoft.
So, what is it with the stupid pattern search? The lack of a built-in programming or scripting language that easily lets you configure what your phone does or does not do? The lack of UI customization that does survive updates?
This is not strong AI we are talking about here, it is weak AI. Strong AI does not exist. Weak AI cannot do anything that requires insight or understanding. It just can do statistical classification.
Sure, I had to make one concession to the ASCII-challenged, I now filter HTML through lynx as more and more people do not even understand a request for "non-HTML" email these days, but that is it. With very rare exceptions this is entirely enough for email.
You make one mistake here: You think that educating the likes of you is worthwhile. I have tried and know better. Arrogant and stupid is sure-fire way to become resistant to insight.
Just one point: Anybody with some actual understanding knows that counting-metrics only make sense if the things counted are quite similar. Even a brief look at some random sample of CVEs immediately shows that this is not at all the case here and that counting is meaningless for the case at hand. Hence anybody promoting a counting-metric here is extremely disconnected from reality (or a big, fat liar) and any attempt at educating such a person is consequentially futile.
Well, the Big Lie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie) here is that no jobs were lost and it works because many people are not able to see the whole system. So, yes, no jobs lost at Amazon, but more business moved from competitors (job loss there) and no jobs generated at Amazon to compensate.
The problem here is that many things that we thought required intelligence do not actually do so. For example, driving under normal conditions is one such thing. A lot of administrative work qualifies. Not today, to be sure, but in the next 10-30 years, much of this work will be automatized. Sure, there will still be quite a few people that will have work, as some things do need intelligence and there is nothing even on the distant horizon that will give machines intelligence. (A senior member of the IBM Watson team recently told me "not in the next 50 years".) But the work that needs intelligence will be something like 10% of the work people do today. The rest currently does things that can be _mostly_ automatized and the part that cannot be can be done by far fewer people and will be concentrated on fewer people, jut like the example of one person supervising several robots. And while that has not reduced jobs at Amazon, it will have reduced jobs overall by effects on competitors.
Actually, we will need something like 5-10% of the population to still work, but for the rest we will need to find ways to get money to them for buying stuff, and, as a society, we will need to find ways for them to feel useful, at least for most. Many people unfortunately go off the rails when they do not have something (apparently) useful to do.
An UBI will only solve the first problem, but not the second one. It will probably be the largest challenge western society has ever faced.
Slashdot Mirror
And there you have demonstrated that you have no clue how Science works. "Nature did it with meat" has no scientific basis. All Science has is interface observations. And even a child these days knows that what you can observe on the outside of a box is not necessarily created on the inside.
Seriously, stop pretending your anti-science quasi-religious fundamentalist beliefs are science. They are not.
You seem to be unaware of the definition of "magic". Makes you look pretty dumb....
Also, you basically seem to imply that consciousness is an "emergent property" of complexity (because Physics sure does not have a mechanism for it), and that means you do not understand Physics at all.
You also seem to be lacking the basic knowledge required to actually understand the references you gave. They do not say what you think they say...
This is just marketing BS and people deciding about scientific funding are not immune to it. So "automation" and "statistical classification" became "weak AI" and sometimes just AI (even though there is not even a hint of "I" in this type of "AI"). "Classifier parametrization" became "machine learning" (learning requires insight, none of that is to be had here though). There are numerous other atrocities against language and reason, all perpetrated to make things sound grand and to get more money.
As to strong AI, I think we now have collected ample evidence that either our grasp of Physics is fundamentally incomplete, or that purely physical constructs cannot be intelligent. And "replicating a mammalian brain"? That will not be within the grasp of humanity for thousands of years and likely never. You massively underestimate the complexity needed.
Likely he is not right either, because AI beyond statistical classification ("weak AI") may well be impossible, but trying new things is at the core of actual research. Although other approaches have been used in other fields and have failed to produce any hint of intelligence as well. For example automated theorem proving found that it cannot really be used to _find_ theorems, because the universe is a bit too small and short-lived to build the machinery for that. It is a very good tools in verifying tools though that humans have found, even if humans need to help it along with that too.
In that world we would not have racists, because racism is just a mechanism of losers to claim "I am better than those others because they have race characteristic XYZ, but I do not". Listen to some black racists some time and the utter stupidity of the racist idea becomes glaringly obvious.
These are established definitions. There is nothing "odd" about them.
But just to give you an intuition: Weak AI cannot plan, cannot judge, cannot explore and cannot in fact do anything that requires "initiative", "insight" or "understanding". It can just, given a large set of example decisions that share strong statistical characteristics, perform more of the same decisions so that they are similar to the decisions it got as input. In some cases this is enough to fake intelligence to a degree, but there is absolutely no intelligence in there.
"Strong AI" would be able to come up with goals, find out how previously unknown tasks can be divided into smaller tasks, can design experiments, etc.
In a sense, weak AI cannot do any of the things commonly associated with intelligence, but it can fake some of them under some circumstances. This fools many people that are only able to judge a thing by its outer form, but fail to understand inner workings. These people then believe things like pattern recognition of known patterns, sorting things according to known criteria, finding clusters along parameter axes, etc. are feats of intelligence. None of them are. They can be performed by mindless dumb algorithms. The only thing weak AI has going for it is that statistical classifiers are cheaper to build and parameterize than traditional algorithms for some problems, because you do not need to build an accurate model first. They cannot actually do more though than dumb classical algorithms and that can be mathematically demonstrated.
If you want to know more, I recommend spending a year or several with actual research literature. This is not some mystical BS definition, this is a hard, scientifically sound distinction.
I mean a real strong AI is an entity that is sentient.
That is unclear at this time. Sure, we only observe "strong intelligence" in connection with self-awareness and free will, so it seems reasonable that these are aspects of the same thing, but there is actually no scientific evidence either way. And there are a few problems both with free will and self-awareness. For one thing, there is absolutely no mechanism for self-awareness in Physics. It seems to be an extra-physical thing. In Physics, the whole is not and cannot be more than the sum of its parts. There are really only two ways out of this: a) Physics is grossly incomplete as known to us at this time and b) some dualist notion of a "soul" that provides the capability for self-awareness, insight and intuition (does not require religious bullshit). A pretty similar problem applies with free will.
Note that even if humans do it by way of a "soul", that would still not necessarily preclude purely mechanical intelligence. However that there is not even a theory after half a century of AI research how actual intelligence could be implemented with the physical limitations this universe has is a pretty strong hint that something extra is critically required.
You are welcome to be a mindless p-zombie (as you just basically said that you cannot have insights, you are one), but I am not one of those.
My guess would be Google actually just is using some weak AI mechanisms and they did not feed in a list of things that are "forbidden". Does say bad things about some of their customers, but the world is full of idiots and _that_ cannot be fixed.
You are advocating censorship and propaganda. These are universally abused as soon as established and far worse than having stupid people think stupid things on their own. The only think we can to without making matters much worse is to be resilient as a society and tolerate the idiots. Any attempt at suppression is not only futile, but dangerous.
Google is profiting from what people want. If you force them to censor, you are banning things. While this state of affairs is not good, the proposed "cure" is far worse.
Caveat: I do think Google is an evil large corporation these days, but that is the normal state of things in capitalism. (No, communism is even worse, there you have an evil, all-encompassing state.)
Indeed. And it validates those ideas and the people that have them by the "David vs. Goliath" effect. (Works something like this: "They have to suppress the idea. Hence the idea must have merit, because otherwise they would have actual arguments against it and would not need to suppress it.)
But the cave-man reflex is to apply violence to anything they not not like, in modern times by proxy of the big fetish of "the law". This routinely makes matters much worse.
Actually, people find out about racism all by themselves. It is one of the common ways to of fuckups to elevate themselves above others. Fuckups that are still kids do discover it all by themselves. The idea is pretty simple and obvious: Identify some characteristic somebody else has that they cannot do anything about and are not actually responsible for and that you yourself do not have. Then attach negative meaning to it.
In particular the bad functionality of Google is utterly pathetic. You often have to comb through a lot of search results until you find something meaningful. Add to that that they basically killed the competition and Google is responsible for a massive dumbing-down. By now they are holding people back as badly as Microsoft.
So, what is it with the stupid pattern search? The lack of a built-in programming or scripting language that easily lets you configure what your phone does or does not do? The lack of UI customization that does survive updates?
This is not strong AI we are talking about here, it is weak AI. Strong AI does not exist. Weak AI cannot do anything that requires insight or understanding. It just can do statistical classification.
I used to be on elm (wayyy back), but I found mutt works better for me. It is a matter of taste though.
As if HTML to readable text/plain is so difficult.
Indeed. Might be an attempt to force people on HTML, otherwise it makes zero sense.
I have very few tables in email, but if that changes, I will try elinks2. Thanks for the tip!
This needs to be treated and punished the same as intent.
Oh, IBM would love to be able to have strong AI. They have just realized after trying really hard that it cannot be done anytime soon, if ever.
Sure, I had to make one concession to the ASCII-challenged, I now filter HTML through lynx as more and more people do not even understand a request for "non-HTML" email these days, but that is it. With very rare exceptions this is entirely enough for email.
You make one mistake here: You think that educating the likes of you is worthwhile. I have tried and know better. Arrogant and stupid is sure-fire way to become resistant to insight.
Just one point: Anybody with some actual understanding knows that counting-metrics only make sense if the things counted are quite similar. Even a brief look at some random sample of CVEs immediately shows that this is not at all the case here and that counting is meaningless for the case at hand. Hence anybody promoting a counting-metric here is extremely disconnected from reality (or a big, fat liar) and any attempt at educating such a person is consequentially futile.
Well, the Big Lie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie) here is that no jobs were lost and it works because many people are not able to see the whole system. So, yes, no jobs lost at Amazon, but more business moved from competitors (job loss there) and no jobs generated at Amazon to compensate.
The problem here is that many things that we thought required intelligence do not actually do so. For example, driving under normal conditions is one such thing. A lot of administrative work qualifies. Not today, to be sure, but in the next 10-30 years, much of this work will be automatized. Sure, there will still be quite a few people that will have work, as some things do need intelligence and there is nothing even on the distant horizon that will give machines intelligence. (A senior member of the IBM Watson team recently told me "not in the next 50 years".) But the work that needs intelligence will be something like 10% of the work people do today. The rest currently does things that can be _mostly_ automatized and the part that cannot be can be done by far fewer people and will be concentrated on fewer people, jut like the example of one person supervising several robots. And while that has not reduced jobs at Amazon, it will have reduced jobs overall by effects on competitors.
Actually, we will need something like 5-10% of the population to still work, but for the rest we will need to find ways to get money to them for buying stuff, and, as a society, we will need to find ways for them to feel useful, at least for most. Many people unfortunately go off the rails when they do not have something (apparently) useful to do.
An UBI will only solve the first problem, but not the second one. It will probably be the largest challenge western society has ever faced.