It's basically a gathering ground for trolls, where they post links to specific Slashdot posts that they want to be modded up (generally something that is trollish) in order to get lots of attention to it. Visiting the site itself won't hurt you, just don't click on the Slashdot links on the site unless you have HTTP referers disabled since apparently (according to the original post) Slashcode picks that up now and puts you on a moderator-banned list.
Generally you're right, there needs to be a lot more high def content. But Discovery HD Theater rocks, there is tons of great stuff on there - if there were a 4 or 5 channel HD package all produced by Discovery, I would pay 5 bucks a month extra for that in a second. And watching Showtime and HBO movies in HD is an amazing experience as well, not to mention HBO series shows (Deadwood rocks). Basically, if I'm around for something, I far prefer to watch the high def version - I still end up watching SD stuff from my Tivo more often than not of course, at least until God gives us cablecard and HD cable Tivo (no satellite access possible here, I'm in a NYC high rise apartment building).
Additionally, watching DVDs with a progressive scan player on an HDTV is a beautiful sight. I am pretty sure given the push to sell more HDTVs going on in the market right now that within a few years, there will be 4-5 times as much HD content on the cable and satellite networks. Broadcast HD, like all broadcast TV, will become irrelevant with time, it just served as an interim measure to force the hands of the major broadcast networks to get HD signals out there.
Ah, that does explain where the practice comes from. As best I can tell, it has been referred to officially as "Sun" and not "SUN" for many, many years now (as long as my memory extends back anyway).
What about SUN (as in Sun Microsystems) as I've seen many people refer to it in the industry? Dammit, it's just Sun as far as I can tell, it's not an acronym for anything.
The analogy between building a thinking machine and a flying machine does not hold. I already addressed this exact argument here. Lots of people knew all the basic parameters of how to build a flying machine - there were a few minor engineering problems to be solved.
Those are tweaked parameters. You can't tell me that you genuinely believe the problem of controlling roll is comparable in difficulty to the problem of simulating consciousness? Or even to the problem of simulating human-level problem solving abilities? Geez, get a grip. I'm not saying they didn't do some great engineering work, but the problem of simulating consciousness in a computer is more akin to discovering quantum field theory from scratch than it is to controlling roll on an aircraft. In this scale of problems, yes, those are tweaked parameters.
A brain has billions of processors. The question may be meaningless, but if you ask a bunch of neuroscientists to estimate how much computing power you'd need to match a human brain, almost all the guesses are that you'd need much more than we have.
Well, there are several 10s of billions of neurons, and each would require several thousands of transistors to simulate (from this source: http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/dec99/9451384 90.Ns.r.html, take it or leave it, we're just doing back-of-the envelope stuff here). Let's say 1,000 transistors to be even. Now a modern CPU has roughly 50 million transistors - so let's say that could simulate 500,000 neurons on one chip. So we'd need somewhere around 200,000 processors to simulate a brain. Admittedly, that's a lot, but it's not completely outside of the realm of conceivable computational power even today. And even if you could only build a computer as tenth as fast as you'd need to simulate things in real time, you could always simulate at one-tenth the speed and then take things from there (i.e. serialize certain operations).
I think a bigger issue is all of the interconnections between neurons - each neuron can be connected to up to several thousand other neurons, thanks to the three-dimensional arrangement of the brain. Lots of data exchange involved, lots of information going along specific pathways, but I have no reason to believe that information density isn't something that could be carried by some type of high speed backplane interconnect.
My point is that I don't see the insurmountable computational power barrier. Yes, it would be a big effort to build a computer that could do this, but some of the largest computer clusters and the like already consist of many thousands of high end processors sharing large volumes of data between them. Are we really being held back simply by lack of sufficiently powerful hardware? Do you really think we could have "human brain v1.0" ready to load up on the hardware as soon as it's available?
Okay, well you are welcome to try to simulate consciousness, or self-awareness, or problem-solving without understanding a whit about how humans do it, but people have been trying to build such software for years and it's nowhere near as trivial as you make it out to be. Did people just build computers without understanding quantum mechanics or semiconductor physics first? Did people build combustion engines without understanding basic thermodynamics? I hardly think the example of being able to fling a rock with a lever without understanding all the physics involved is even remotely comparable, and I don't know if you are being intellectually dishonest or are just missing the boat here.
The entire subfield of Computer Science called "AI" was founded to build things like this without really bothering to understand how humans did it. And while it's been very successful in certain domains, it's certainly not been very successful at creating anything like strong AI (abstract problem-solving, Turing-test compliant, whatever the hell your definition it). So if you think you are going to do it yourself as a side effect of some other project, go right ahead, and lots of us will cheer you on if you succeed.
But this is NOT like building a plane where 10 or 12 different groups of people had a rough idea what it required to make it happen and it was just a race to get the right set of tweaked parameters to make powered human flight work.
Okay, but again we're dawdling with philosophy here. Can you make some more concrete statements about this world-mind concept? When most of us talk about consciousness and AI, we are by necessity comparing it with the things that we have experience with, namely human consciousness, and the intelligence that we evolved and that other animal organisms possess.
If I'm part of a "world-mind" consciousness that I can't feel, experience, measure or benefit from, should I give a shit? Sounds like mental masturbation to me.
I mentioned thinking like humans only because the Turing test is at least a quantifiable metric for what most people mean when they talk about AI. And with the kind of human-like assumptions embedded all over this work, I have to assume that any such super-human AI would, at a bare minimum, be able to pass a Turing test.
In any case, regardless, I recognize the possibility of non-humanlike AI, but then we enter into the realm of unquantifiable BS. How do we measure modelling, problem-solving and creativity abilities (other than by something that ends up looking shockingly like a Turing test?). What do those words mean outside of the human context? As I pointed out in another post, outside of very limited, constrained problem domains, we don't have any idea how to wire something up that can do even sub-human "problem-solving" or "modelling". The field of AI has provided lots of great algorithms that turn out to do a decent job at doing near-human-quality work in very limited domains, or much-less-than-human-quality work in slightly less limited, but still very constrained domains. The field of consciousness research, which aims to understand and presumably, eventually, model the human brain is still nascent.
I trust the instinct of Francis Crick who spent the last years of his life working on this problem that it will be a huge problem that dogs science for years to come. Just like how Einstein spent his last years looking for a TOE - guess what, here we are decades later, and we are _slightly_ closer, but basically up against a brick wall.
I recognize the ability (in theory) to self-improve or evolve rapidly in software would make a "Singularity" type of scenario at least conceivable (assuming there are no other barriers to this sort of rapidly improving digital intelligence) if you can get past the humongous hurdles in getting there. I just don't think it's likely to happen in the next 10 or 20 or 30 years. And beyond that, I prefer not to speculate, or at least not to pretend that my speculations are much more than pure science fiction themselves.
Enough to know that it's a hard problem, maybe not fully solvable in my lifetime.
Given enough research into the structure of the brain and hardware fast enough to run the emulation seems to me that a good emulation might just wake up and be conscious.
Okay, but that's just a restatement of the problem - in other words, if you can emulate the human brain in a computer, than you have effectively created consciousness. Now can you provide a rough estimate of how long it would take to build such a thing? Do you understand how any of the pieces should fit together? If you have done any research into what is currently called "AI" or consciousness research, you would realize how far off this still is. When you move past the wide-eyed speculation and try to build it, you realize this problem is almost as frustrating as trying to build a Faster-Than-Light propulsion drive.
Precisely. This is constrained by our inability to effectively simulate processes that we reasonably could label "modelling", "problem-solving", "creativity" or "self-awareness". Again, I also point out definitional problems - we don't even have a meaningful metric for how good an AI's "problem-solving" skills are, because most "AI" applications really can only solve problems within a very limited domain (and in those cases, we can often come up with a trivial fitness metric for the capabilities of the AI). As soon as you generalize to "we want an AI that can solve problems", we don't even have the first inkling of a design or implementation of algorithms that can give us what we are looking for.
Like you, I don't believe this problem is likely to be solved (i.e. the above mentioned processes modelled in software well-enough to simulate at a human or super-human level) in the next 10-20 years.
I'm not sure how impressed I am with that Vinge piece. In order for computers to start thinking like humans, we first have to be able to properly understand and model how humans think. The computers, no matter how massive the computational power available to them is, aren't going to spontaneously "wake up" (what the hell is he talking about there?) and develop consciousness - humans developed consciousness because brains evolved via very complex evolutionary mechanisms over millenia - mechanisms that computers don't exhibit or use.
His assertion that this depends on the progress of computing hardware seems absurd to me. We already have as much computing hardware as we need, where computing hardware is all essentially capable of handling Turing-complete computation (in the lax sense of the phrase, obviously computational power and storage are finite, but not so limited that it's hampering our ability to simulate human intelligence).
Then he makes the assumption that if we are able to create a human-level artificial intelligence (which is itself a somewhat ill-defined concept), it will be able to figure out how to improve itself to be substantially "better" than human intelligence. But do we really have any metric for what that even means? I mean, we still don't have a firm grasp on even measuring human intelligence very well.
I am not saying his scenario is impossible or that it won't happen. Computers can already do certain tasks far better than humans, and that will continue to be the case. He seems to want a program capable of designing other programs. Is the first program Turing-test passing? Is it "smarter" than humans because it is better at recognizing patterns and reacting to them? Or smarter because it can generate and test hypotheses more rapidly? I feel very uncomfortable with drawing lots of conclusions about the future rate of progress of a topic that feels so ill defined to me.
I agree that mastering consciousness and thought, and understanding the human brain will be one of the next great frontiers of science, and with that mastery ought to eventually come much better ability to simulate it in silico. But I'm not willing to speculate too much farther ahead than that.
Of course I know that. If the other Arabs cared so much about the Palestinians earnestly they wouldn't have let so many of them sit in refugee camps for years. No, I realize that the Palestinians are if anything a convenient fact for most Arab rulers who use the issue to distract their own oppressed citizenry's attention away from domestic issues and corruption and point them toward their poor oppressed brothers.
No, outside of the Palestinian territories themselves the hatred of Israel is, ironically, more because Israel represents a standard and way of life from the West that constantly seems to remind the Arabs of their own past imperial subjugation. Those annoying Jews taking that holy land, and making a living off of it, while the Arabs have the other 99.9% of the land in the Middle East and can't figure out how to make money other than pumping their black gold out of the ground. Might have something to do with their oppressive society and values, fanatical religious elements, lack of focus on basic education, human and voting rights for the lowly masses. Could be that, maybe. In any case, the fact that the Israelis beat Egypt, Syria, Jordan, et. al. in several wars makes the inferiority complex that much more acute.
Yes, and you can already get retired early by a family member for your life insurance policy. This is no different than a supplemental policy in its likelihood to have family members prematurely "retiring" you.
Well, again back to the India/Hinduism analogy. They call themselves "Indian" because they come from a country called India (Bharat in Hindi, I believe), but that is a modern, artificial designation. The traditional religion of the ethnic groups of the region is Hinduism, which is composed of a traditional cultural caste system derived from Indo-European roots - the line between the religion and the ethnicity is not drawn in any strong way by its practioners.
The concept of "genetic background" and "race" are basically problematic concepts to begin with. There are no clear cut races at all per se, there are cultural identities and groupings of genetic traits within particularly communities, and plenty of evidence points to the fact that Ashkenazi Jews have a whole bunch of distinct genetic characteristics (such as tendencies to suffer from particular genetic diseases, like Tay Sachs syndrome). In any case, there is a name for the Semitic tribe I referred to though, they called themselves the Hebrews. Ultimately the people who were the Hebrews were thrown out of the land of Israel, and they became the Ashkenazim (the Hebrews who migrated to Germany and Eastern Europe) and the Sephardim (the Hebrews who migrated to Spain, North Africa and the Arabic lands) in the diaspora, the two modern ethnic groupings of Jews, who also have slight variations in their pronunciation of the Hebrew language, and variations in their traditions and practices of the Jewish religion. Plenty of Americans of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage are not practicing Jews at all - and, many seem surprised to discover that the majority of Israeli Jews are ethnic Ashkenazim or Sephardim, but not practicing religious Jews at all.
As an odd aside, here in America, many Jews attend Reform or Conservative synagogues, but still drive on Saturdays and don't keep Kosher, and the Orthodox, or traditionally observant, Jews form a small minority. In Israel, on the other hand, things are far more extreme - people seem to mostly be either traditionally observant Jews or completely nonreligious.
No, I didn't make a moral argument, certainly not a Utilitarian-style argument weighing the "goodness" of various peoples' lives. My point was that a financial incentive system to encourage donation of organs would produce a net positive benefit for society. How would such a system fuck anybody over? It would benefit the poor by providing funds to cover funerals and provide a cushion when a family member passes away, if they donate the deceased's organs. And if it's taxpayer/insurance company/whatever funded, it's not in any way shutting poor people out from getting donations, it's just a way to increase the supply to the point that there is no shortage, and everybody who needs an organ can get one.
Judaism is a religion, not a race, and the idea of a jewish homeland is as ludicrious as the idea of a secular homeland, a christian homeland, or a muslim homeland.
This isn't really right. Judaism is a religion, but the Jews are absolutely a distinct ethnic group as well. Certainly, one that has had intermarriage with host nations to a certain extent over the centuries, but there are many genetic indicators of population distinctiveness of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe (I would assume a similar case for the Sephardic Jews of Spain, North Africa and Arab countries). Of course, race and ethnicity are funny concepts - what makes an Armenian an Armenian? Is it the language, the culture, the identity, the genetics, or all of the above? In any case, the specifics of whether modern Jews correspond exactly as an ethnic group to the original Hebrew people during the biblical times is as hard to answer as whether modern Palestinian Arabs correspond to biblical "Canaanites" and are really the original inhabitants of the land, simply a different Semitic tribe than the Hebrews (but all broadly of the Semitic "race", whatever that means), or more recent Arab transplants from other Arab regions (in some cases, this is certainly the case, some being very recent Arab transplants indeed).
Which is why when it comes down to it, what matters is that Palestinian Arabs consider themselves a unique national group within the broader Arab population (though how exactly you tell, say, a Jordanian Arab from a Palestinian Arab is not clear to me - is there truly any ethnic difference whatsoever?), and Jews consider themselves a distinct ethnic group as well.
I think a big part of the problem is that most Americans are Christians, and the American and Christian concept of religion is that it is something completely distinct from ethnicity, race and nationality. Historically, this is because Christianity is a religion of converts. Judaism is the traditional religion of a particular Semitic tribe, more like Hinduism, which is the collection of evolved tradition and mythology of the peoples of India. In that sense it is unlike its offshoots, Christianity and Islam, both of which grew to include many different racial and ethnic groups through conversion, both forced and voluntary (there are a few specific examples of large-scale conversion to Judaism, such as the Khazar people, and definitely many smaller scale examples, but this is the exception rather than the rule).
Nobody doubts that Jews can find other places to live right now. The problem was that in 1940 or thereabouts, many Jews couldn't find anywhere to live fast enough, and many died when they were unable to get out of Europe into a country that would take them. That's the justifiable paranoia that I mention that most Jews have ingrained as part of their psyche - it derives from centuries of getting kicked out of various countries or being persecuted or slaughtered by various host countries.
Well, your suggestion, which seems to be that we try to prevent the wealthy from getting good health care to make things more "fair" is ridiculous. People don't even have these conversations in other civilized countries, because the health care baseline is so much higher than it is in the US, that the benefits the wealthy obtain with respect to health care are not so flagrant and obvious. If everybody got "pretty good" health care, and there were enough organs to go around, we wouldn't be so worried about keeping the system "fair" by allocating health care like an insanely scarce commodity to be divvied up. Then if the rich still want to pay for more luxurient hospital suites, or for faster service on non-critical surgery, or something of that sort, turn it into a profit center for hospitals that goes back into providing better care for all.
The organ shortage problem is so absurdly easy to fix that it's annoying. Just give people enough of an incentive to donate, or make it more work to not donate than it is to donate, and voila, the problem will be fixed. The cost to everybody: low. The benefit accrued to all of us, especially those who ever need an organ or who have a loved one who does: immeasureable. This is a no-brainer. I'm sick as hell of the medical ethicists dilly dallying around with this shit while people die. Dead people don't have the luxury of worrying about the ethics of their dillemma.
All the complex ethics in the world won't matter much to you if you are dead. We can always deal with the outlier cases as they occur - hell, it's already possibly that somebody could end up in the exact situation you describe with life insurance.
Frankly, I don't see the complex ethical issues you describe - I see the situation as a whole getting much better, with much more organ availability, with a reasonable cash incentive system in place. Whether it's market-force driven or completely regulated and taxpayer-funded, I don't really care much, as long as it eliminates organ waiting lists. Yes, I'd be willing to pay an extra fifty bucks in taxes a year to fund a system that meant I could be sure if I ever needed an organ donation, I wouldn't have to wait for 4 years on a waiting list while I became sick enough to merit a donation, but not too sick to be abandoned as already dead. Saving lives is good, this stupid obsession with "fairness" at the expense of everything else is ridiculous given how ludicrously unfair everything in the health care system (in the US at least) already is.
The health care system sucks, but if it was your family, you'd do the same. If you wouldn't, then you are an uncaring rotten bastard. If you just go around doing what the doctors and insurance companies tell you you are supposed to or allowed to do, you are unlikely to survive a serious illness for very long in the US, and yes, I am speaking from personal experience.
I know if I were in the same spot as Todd, I'd go move my ass to another country where the organ donation system wasn't so fouled up, and there are plenty of donors to go around. Then you have the rest of your life, having saved it, to worry about the ethical dillemma caused by your actions. Being dead has a nasty way of preventing you from being too concerned with such things.
In any case, what bothers me about these cases is that there is really no need for these shortages - the system needs an immediate change. Either it should be opt-out, presumed donation consent, or there need to be financial incentives to opt-in to organ donation. This whole "give the gift of life" thing is nice, but it just doesn't speak to many people unless they've been in the situation themselves. I think the message "it's like a second life insurance policy that costs you nothing" would speak directly to people where it matters, their family's wallets.
I've had reasonable discussion and debate with a pro-Palestinian person... who was in fact Palestinian (or rather, of half Palestinian and half whatever American Caucasian ancestry... and in fact, this person's father was a US ambassador to a major Middle Eastern nation). But that was a very intelligent, well-educated person, who despite their ancestry, did understand both sides of the situation (living in New York, with many Jewish friends around, makes it hard to not be at least reasonably aware with respect to these issues).
The most virulent pro-Palestinian, unreasoned debate often comes from disaffected supposed liberal college students, some of them Jewish themselves, bless their well-meaning hearts. There are lots of these sorts on Slashdot, posting their bile-ridden, angry, anti-Zionist, anti-Israeli rhetoric every time a story is even remotely connected to Israel. And, as often as not, it's pretty hard to discern anti-Zionist from anti-Semitic, due to the rage-filled manner in which it's expressed. I saw lots of this at Harvard - the Chomsky-lovers, who seem to be as misguided as their slightly crazed, but also well-meaning hero himself. As for Chomsky himself, he seems so inconsistent in the things he says that it's hard for me to take a real stand on him - one minute he's a rational, reasonable critic of Israeli policy, the next he seems to be a virulent, self-hating Jew, guilty of the same kinds of broad generalizations, paranoia, fact-bending and misattribution that you would expect of a true anti-Semite. Depends on what day of the month he was writing, I guess.
You seem a bit paranoid - like "Zionism" is some sort of monolithic conspiricy. I am Jewish, and certainly nobody has ever invited me to be part of this conspiracy. Most modern Jewish Zionists are not nutcases, just reasonably paranoid Jews, extrapolating from our people's history. I won't say there are no nutcases, because there certainly are a few, but nowhere near the number, funding, coordination to have organized September 11th and set it up so perfectly to appear as is Al Qaeda did it, then get Al Qaeda to claim responsibility - I mean, that would be quite a feat indeed.
Howbout I take the hardware from Sun, the software from Apple and the services from you, all for free, and make them work together? Sounds like a perfectly reasonable deal to me.
What do you mean by that? For example in what way would New York City be inadequate?
Well, America could decide that it no longer wants Jews within its borders, for example, as did many previously Jewish-friendly countries in World War II. I realize in this context, the concept seems absurd, and beyond inconceivable, but only because of the military strength of America and its resistance to invasion (compare, for example, to Jews in France pre-Nazi invasion - they probably felt safe, and many surely said "why do we need a homeland, we have Paris!"). In any case, though it seems implausible now, it wasn't always so, and I think back in the 1940s or 50s, it wouldn't have seemed so implausible. And again, when you look at these things with an eye to the long term, beyond one person's lifetime, I think it's hard to say what happens centuries down the road, whether America will still exist as it exists today as a safe harbor. Furthermore, what about all the Jews who live in other countries and have been persecuted (Iran for instance - they went on a Jew-hanging spree a couple of years back)? Does America always offer a place for them? I realize theoretically America tries to take in refugees from all over, but realistically, America can't be EVERYBODY'S refugee dumping ground all the time.
Do you mean exclusively for Jewish people?
Yes, I do support that. I support the same for the Kurds too, and other groups that similarly are perpetually shat on in other host countries - if the Kurds had a homeland they could flee to and a government to represent their interests on the world stage, you can damn well believe they would be in a better place as a people.
Do you mean that non-Jewish people should have exactly the same rights? If not why not?
Well, I think non-Jewish citizens of Israel should have the same rights - I don't support the concept of multiple tiers of citizenship. I just don't think Israel should have to take all of the Palestinians in that want to come, if they can obtain citizenship in a Palestinian state governing the territories in which they currently live. Like I said in another post, I think over the long term, a confederation that protects each others citizens rights in both countries would be an excellent solution, but I don't think the people of either group are quite ready for that.
Do you mean that a Palestinian who was born within the borders of Israel has an equal right to live there? If not how can you claim that there are equal rights without resorting to sophistry?
Well, you are clearly American (as am I), so to us citizenship is defined by location of birth. However, that's not a trait shared by most nations or even the majority of democracies. Plenty of countries have other standards for determining citizenship. I don't think people should be left stateless, but I don't think that a country has to accept that as its definition for citizenship in order to be a democracy.
The problem with your trite slogan is that the reality is that Israel has become an apartheid state, a state where non-Jews are discriminated against and your slogan is given as justification at each step.
Okay, let's say I agree with all of this. That still doesn't mean I have to accept that all of the Palestinians should be made Israeli citizens, and that we should kill the concept of Israel as a Jewish homeland. Israel could completely separate church and state, give Israeli Arabs equal rights and protections, and still come up with an amicable two-state solution.
Both sides attack civilians, both sides violate the laws of war, both sides are guilty.
Well, we just differ on this obviously. I don't see the CURRENT Israel attacking civilians intentionally. Most of the evidence I've seen indicates that the majority of Palestinians killed are not innocent civilians getting
Slashdot Mirror
It's basically a gathering ground for trolls, where they post links to specific Slashdot posts that they want to be modded up (generally something that is trollish) in order to get lots of attention to it. Visiting the site itself won't hurt you, just don't click on the Slashdot links on the site unless you have HTTP referers disabled since apparently (according to the original post) Slashcode picks that up now and puts you on a moderator-banned list.
Additionally, watching DVDs with a progressive scan player on an HDTV is a beautiful sight. I am pretty sure given the push to sell more HDTVs going on in the market right now that within a few years, there will be 4-5 times as much HD content on the cable and satellite networks. Broadcast HD, like all broadcast TV, will become irrelevant with time, it just served as an interim measure to force the hands of the major broadcast networks to get HD signals out there.
Ah, that does explain where the practice comes from. As best I can tell, it has been referred to officially as "Sun" and not "SUN" for many, many years now (as long as my memory extends back anyway).
What about SUN (as in Sun Microsystems) as I've seen many people refer to it in the industry? Dammit, it's just Sun as far as I can tell, it's not an acronym for anything.
The analogy between building a thinking machine and a flying machine does not hold. I already addressed this exact argument here. Lots of people knew all the basic parameters of how to build a flying machine - there were a few minor engineering problems to be solved.
Those are tweaked parameters. You can't tell me that you genuinely believe the problem of controlling roll is comparable in difficulty to the problem of simulating consciousness? Or even to the problem of simulating human-level problem solving abilities? Geez, get a grip. I'm not saying they didn't do some great engineering work, but the problem of simulating consciousness in a computer is more akin to discovering quantum field theory from scratch than it is to controlling roll on an aircraft. In this scale of problems, yes, those are tweaked parameters.
Well, there are several 10s of billions of neurons, and each would require several thousands of transistors to simulate (from this source: http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/dec99/945138
I think a bigger issue is all of the interconnections between neurons - each neuron can be connected to up to several thousand other neurons, thanks to the three-dimensional arrangement of the brain. Lots of data exchange involved, lots of information going along specific pathways, but I have no reason to believe that information density isn't something that could be carried by some type of high speed backplane interconnect.
My point is that I don't see the insurmountable computational power barrier. Yes, it would be a big effort to build a computer that could do this, but some of the largest computer clusters and the like already consist of many thousands of high end processors sharing large volumes of data between them. Are we really being held back simply by lack of sufficiently powerful hardware? Do you really think we could have "human brain v1.0" ready to load up on the hardware as soon as it's available?
The entire subfield of Computer Science called "AI" was founded to build things like this without really bothering to understand how humans did it. And while it's been very successful in certain domains, it's certainly not been very successful at creating anything like strong AI (abstract problem-solving, Turing-test compliant, whatever the hell your definition it). So if you think you are going to do it yourself as a side effect of some other project, go right ahead, and lots of us will cheer you on if you succeed.
But this is NOT like building a plane where 10 or 12 different groups of people had a rough idea what it required to make it happen and it was just a race to get the right set of tweaked parameters to make powered human flight work.
If I'm part of a "world-mind" consciousness that I can't feel, experience, measure or benefit from, should I give a shit? Sounds like mental masturbation to me.
In any case, regardless, I recognize the possibility of non-humanlike AI, but then we enter into the realm of unquantifiable BS. How do we measure modelling, problem-solving and creativity abilities (other than by something that ends up looking shockingly like a Turing test?). What do those words mean outside of the human context? As I pointed out in another post, outside of very limited, constrained problem domains, we don't have any idea how to wire something up that can do even sub-human "problem-solving" or "modelling". The field of AI has provided lots of great algorithms that turn out to do a decent job at doing near-human-quality work in very limited domains, or much-less-than-human-quality work in slightly less limited, but still very constrained domains. The field of consciousness research, which aims to understand and presumably, eventually, model the human brain is still nascent.
I trust the instinct of Francis Crick who spent the last years of his life working on this problem that it will be a huge problem that dogs science for years to come. Just like how Einstein spent his last years looking for a TOE - guess what, here we are decades later, and we are _slightly_ closer, but basically up against a brick wall.
I recognize the ability (in theory) to self-improve or evolve rapidly in software would make a "Singularity" type of scenario at least conceivable (assuming there are no other barriers to this sort of rapidly improving digital intelligence) if you can get past the humongous hurdles in getting there. I just don't think it's likely to happen in the next 10 or 20 or 30 years. And beyond that, I prefer not to speculate, or at least not to pretend that my speculations are much more than pure science fiction themselves.
No? What do you know about consciousness then?
Enough to know that it's a hard problem, maybe not fully solvable in my lifetime.
Given enough research into the structure of the brain and hardware fast enough to run the emulation seems to me that a good emulation might just wake up and be conscious.
Okay, but that's just a restatement of the problem - in other words, if you can emulate the human brain in a computer, than you have effectively created consciousness. Now can you provide a rough estimate of how long it would take to build such a thing? Do you understand how any of the pieces should fit together? If you have done any research into what is currently called "AI" or consciousness research, you would realize how far off this still is. When you move past the wide-eyed speculation and try to build it, you realize this problem is almost as frustrating as trying to build a Faster-Than-Light propulsion drive.
Like you, I don't believe this problem is likely to be solved (i.e. the above mentioned processes modelled in software well-enough to simulate at a human or super-human level) in the next 10-20 years.
His assertion that this depends on the progress of computing hardware seems absurd to me. We already have as much computing hardware as we need, where computing hardware is all essentially capable of handling Turing-complete computation (in the lax sense of the phrase, obviously computational power and storage are finite, but not so limited that it's hampering our ability to simulate human intelligence).
Then he makes the assumption that if we are able to create a human-level artificial intelligence (which is itself a somewhat ill-defined concept), it will be able to figure out how to improve itself to be substantially "better" than human intelligence. But do we really have any metric for what that even means? I mean, we still don't have a firm grasp on even measuring human intelligence very well.
I am not saying his scenario is impossible or that it won't happen. Computers can already do certain tasks far better than humans, and that will continue to be the case. He seems to want a program capable of designing other programs. Is the first program Turing-test passing? Is it "smarter" than humans because it is better at recognizing patterns and reacting to them? Or smarter because it can generate and test hypotheses more rapidly? I feel very uncomfortable with drawing lots of conclusions about the future rate of progress of a topic that feels so ill defined to me.
I agree that mastering consciousness and thought, and understanding the human brain will be one of the next great frontiers of science, and with that mastery ought to eventually come much better ability to simulate it in silico. But I'm not willing to speculate too much farther ahead than that.
No, outside of the Palestinian territories themselves the hatred of Israel is, ironically, more because Israel represents a standard and way of life from the West that constantly seems to remind the Arabs of their own past imperial subjugation. Those annoying Jews taking that holy land, and making a living off of it, while the Arabs have the other 99.9% of the land in the Middle East and can't figure out how to make money other than pumping their black gold out of the ground. Might have something to do with their oppressive society and values, fanatical religious elements, lack of focus on basic education, human and voting rights for the lowly masses. Could be that, maybe. In any case, the fact that the Israelis beat Egypt, Syria, Jordan, et. al. in several wars makes the inferiority complex that much more acute.
Yes, and you can already get retired early by a family member for your life insurance policy. This is no different than a supplemental policy in its likelihood to have family members prematurely "retiring" you.
The concept of "genetic background" and "race" are basically problematic concepts to begin with. There are no clear cut races at all per se, there are cultural identities and groupings of genetic traits within particularly communities, and plenty of evidence points to the fact that Ashkenazi Jews have a whole bunch of distinct genetic characteristics (such as tendencies to suffer from particular genetic diseases, like Tay Sachs syndrome). In any case, there is a name for the Semitic tribe I referred to though, they called themselves the Hebrews. Ultimately the people who were the Hebrews were thrown out of the land of Israel, and they became the Ashkenazim (the Hebrews who migrated to Germany and Eastern Europe) and the Sephardim (the Hebrews who migrated to Spain, North Africa and the Arabic lands) in the diaspora, the two modern ethnic groupings of Jews, who also have slight variations in their pronunciation of the Hebrew language, and variations in their traditions and practices of the Jewish religion. Plenty of Americans of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage are not practicing Jews at all - and, many seem surprised to discover that the majority of Israeli Jews are ethnic Ashkenazim or Sephardim, but not practicing religious Jews at all.
As an odd aside, here in America, many Jews attend Reform or Conservative synagogues, but still drive on Saturdays and don't keep Kosher, and the Orthodox, or traditionally observant, Jews form a small minority. In Israel, on the other hand, things are far more extreme - people seem to mostly be either traditionally observant Jews or completely nonreligious.
No, I didn't make a moral argument, certainly not a Utilitarian-style argument weighing the "goodness" of various peoples' lives. My point was that a financial incentive system to encourage donation of organs would produce a net positive benefit for society. How would such a system fuck anybody over? It would benefit the poor by providing funds to cover funerals and provide a cushion when a family member passes away, if they donate the deceased's organs. And if it's taxpayer/insurance company/whatever funded, it's not in any way shutting poor people out from getting donations, it's just a way to increase the supply to the point that there is no shortage, and everybody who needs an organ can get one.
This isn't really right. Judaism is a religion, but the Jews are absolutely a distinct ethnic group as well. Certainly, one that has had intermarriage with host nations to a certain extent over the centuries, but there are many genetic indicators of population distinctiveness of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe (I would assume a similar case for the Sephardic Jews of Spain, North Africa and Arab countries). Of course, race and ethnicity are funny concepts - what makes an Armenian an Armenian? Is it the language, the culture, the identity, the genetics, or all of the above? In any case, the specifics of whether modern Jews correspond exactly as an ethnic group to the original Hebrew people during the biblical times is as hard to answer as whether modern Palestinian Arabs correspond to biblical "Canaanites" and are really the original inhabitants of the land, simply a different Semitic tribe than the Hebrews (but all broadly of the Semitic "race", whatever that means), or more recent Arab transplants from other Arab regions (in some cases, this is certainly the case, some being very recent Arab transplants indeed).
Which is why when it comes down to it, what matters is that Palestinian Arabs consider themselves a unique national group within the broader Arab population (though how exactly you tell, say, a Jordanian Arab from a Palestinian Arab is not clear to me - is there truly any ethnic difference whatsoever?), and Jews consider themselves a distinct ethnic group as well.
I think a big part of the problem is that most Americans are Christians, and the American and Christian concept of religion is that it is something completely distinct from ethnicity, race and nationality. Historically, this is because Christianity is a religion of converts. Judaism is the traditional religion of a particular Semitic tribe, more like Hinduism, which is the collection of evolved tradition and mythology of the peoples of India. In that sense it is unlike its offshoots, Christianity and Islam, both of which grew to include many different racial and ethnic groups through conversion, both forced and voluntary (there are a few specific examples of large-scale conversion to Judaism, such as the Khazar people, and definitely many smaller scale examples, but this is the exception rather than the rule).
Nobody doubts that Jews can find other places to live right now. The problem was that in 1940 or thereabouts, many Jews couldn't find anywhere to live fast enough, and many died when they were unable to get out of Europe into a country that would take them. That's the justifiable paranoia that I mention that most Jews have ingrained as part of their psyche - it derives from centuries of getting kicked out of various countries or being persecuted or slaughtered by various host countries.
The organ shortage problem is so absurdly easy to fix that it's annoying. Just give people enough of an incentive to donate, or make it more work to not donate than it is to donate, and voila, the problem will be fixed. The cost to everybody: low. The benefit accrued to all of us, especially those who ever need an organ or who have a loved one who does: immeasureable. This is a no-brainer. I'm sick as hell of the medical ethicists dilly dallying around with this shit while people die. Dead people don't have the luxury of worrying about the ethics of their dillemma.
Frankly, I don't see the complex ethical issues you describe - I see the situation as a whole getting much better, with much more organ availability, with a reasonable cash incentive system in place. Whether it's market-force driven or completely regulated and taxpayer-funded, I don't really care much, as long as it eliminates organ waiting lists. Yes, I'd be willing to pay an extra fifty bucks in taxes a year to fund a system that meant I could be sure if I ever needed an organ donation, I wouldn't have to wait for 4 years on a waiting list while I became sick enough to merit a donation, but not too sick to be abandoned as already dead. Saving lives is good, this stupid obsession with "fairness" at the expense of everything else is ridiculous given how ludicrously unfair everything in the health care system (in the US at least) already is.
I know if I were in the same spot as Todd, I'd go move my ass to another country where the organ donation system wasn't so fouled up, and there are plenty of donors to go around. Then you have the rest of your life, having saved it, to worry about the ethical dillemma caused by your actions. Being dead has a nasty way of preventing you from being too concerned with such things.
In any case, what bothers me about these cases is that there is really no need for these shortages - the system needs an immediate change. Either it should be opt-out, presumed donation consent, or there need to be financial incentives to opt-in to organ donation. This whole "give the gift of life" thing is nice, but it just doesn't speak to many people unless they've been in the situation themselves. I think the message "it's like a second life insurance policy that costs you nothing" would speak directly to people where it matters, their family's wallets.
The most virulent pro-Palestinian, unreasoned debate often comes from disaffected supposed liberal college students, some of them Jewish themselves, bless their well-meaning hearts. There are lots of these sorts on Slashdot, posting their bile-ridden, angry, anti-Zionist, anti-Israeli rhetoric every time a story is even remotely connected to Israel. And, as often as not, it's pretty hard to discern anti-Zionist from anti-Semitic, due to the rage-filled manner in which it's expressed. I saw lots of this at Harvard - the Chomsky-lovers, who seem to be as misguided as their slightly crazed, but also well-meaning hero himself. As for Chomsky himself, he seems so inconsistent in the things he says that it's hard for me to take a real stand on him - one minute he's a rational, reasonable critic of Israeli policy, the next he seems to be a virulent, self-hating Jew, guilty of the same kinds of broad generalizations, paranoia, fact-bending and misattribution that you would expect of a true anti-Semite. Depends on what day of the month he was writing, I guess.
You seem a bit paranoid - like "Zionism" is some sort of monolithic conspiricy. I am Jewish, and certainly nobody has ever invited me to be part of this conspiracy. Most modern Jewish Zionists are not nutcases, just reasonably paranoid Jews, extrapolating from our people's history. I won't say there are no nutcases, because there certainly are a few, but nowhere near the number, funding, coordination to have organized September 11th and set it up so perfectly to appear as is Al Qaeda did it, then get Al Qaeda to claim responsibility - I mean, that would be quite a feat indeed.
Howbout I take the hardware from Sun, the software from Apple and the services from you, all for free, and make them work together? Sounds like a perfectly reasonable deal to me.
Well, America could decide that it no longer wants Jews within its borders, for example, as did many previously Jewish-friendly countries in World War II. I realize in this context, the concept seems absurd, and beyond inconceivable, but only because of the military strength of America and its resistance to invasion (compare, for example, to Jews in France pre-Nazi invasion - they probably felt safe, and many surely said "why do we need a homeland, we have Paris!"). In any case, though it seems implausible now, it wasn't always so, and I think back in the 1940s or 50s, it wouldn't have seemed so implausible. And again, when you look at these things with an eye to the long term, beyond one person's lifetime, I think it's hard to say what happens centuries down the road, whether America will still exist as it exists today as a safe harbor. Furthermore, what about all the Jews who live in other countries and have been persecuted (Iran for instance - they went on a Jew-hanging spree a couple of years back)? Does America always offer a place for them? I realize theoretically America tries to take in refugees from all over, but realistically, America can't be EVERYBODY'S refugee dumping ground all the time.
Do you mean exclusively for Jewish people?
Yes, I do support that. I support the same for the Kurds too, and other groups that similarly are perpetually shat on in other host countries - if the Kurds had a homeland they could flee to and a government to represent their interests on the world stage, you can damn well believe they would be in a better place as a people.
Do you mean that non-Jewish people should have exactly the same rights? If not why not?
Well, I think non-Jewish citizens of Israel should have the same rights - I don't support the concept of multiple tiers of citizenship. I just don't think Israel should have to take all of the Palestinians in that want to come, if they can obtain citizenship in a Palestinian state governing the territories in which they currently live. Like I said in another post, I think over the long term, a confederation that protects each others citizens rights in both countries would be an excellent solution, but I don't think the people of either group are quite ready for that.
Do you mean that a Palestinian who was born within the borders of Israel has an equal right to live there? If not how can you claim that there are equal rights without resorting to sophistry?
Well, you are clearly American (as am I), so to us citizenship is defined by location of birth. However, that's not a trait shared by most nations or even the majority of democracies. Plenty of countries have other standards for determining citizenship. I don't think people should be left stateless, but I don't think that a country has to accept that as its definition for citizenship in order to be a democracy.
The problem with your trite slogan is that the reality is that Israel has become an apartheid state, a state where non-Jews are discriminated against and your slogan is given as justification at each step.
Okay, let's say I agree with all of this. That still doesn't mean I have to accept that all of the Palestinians should be made Israeli citizens, and that we should kill the concept of Israel as a Jewish homeland. Israel could completely separate church and state, give Israeli Arabs equal rights and protections, and still come up with an amicable two-state solution.
Both sides attack civilians, both sides violate the laws of war, both sides are guilty.
Well, we just differ on this obviously. I don't see the CURRENT Israel attacking civilians intentionally. Most of the evidence I've seen indicates that the majority of Palestinians killed are not innocent civilians getting