Ever taken a ruler and held it over the bottom half of a line of text and been surprised that you can still easily read it? If we cut letters in two we can increase the amount of information on a page and probably be able to what I would call "chunk read," or absorb information and meaning more quickly. It would make, I think, the "parafoveal" capture of extra characters easier. Also, we need to progress to an "emotional alphabet," something like: "a" with a following up arrow indicating rising anger, "j" with a down arrow indicating decreasing jealousy, "h" with an equal sign indicating a sustaining level of hate, etc. It could be much more complicated and subtle. I called it "emotional algebra" to order my thinking. Don't tell me about emoticons. They are for children.
Janet looked at Amelia and smiled brightly while putting out her hand at the business conference. (without emotional algebra, just a couple of actions)
Janet looked at Amelia and smiled brightly while putting out her hand at the business conference. (j,h{up arrow})
[And now we know her internal state while she performed those actions]
How many people in the university actually live and work in the outside world, the real, physical world? Not many. So, they don't understand or appreciate the critical necessity for people who do, the carpenters, mechanics, technicians etc., people who can and do get things done with their hands. Not understanding means not appreciating means not valuing means not funding and manning properly the positions. It would be more economical and understandable to them to hire one essentially useless desk-sitting, phone- manning, "Dean of Apologizing," than to hire the correct number of carpenters. Must keep the budget down after all. And while the task the professor wants accomplished seems important to him the carpenter may just have looked it over and determined it was way down his list of priorities in his busy work day. Bookshelf for some entitled professor? Nope, not now. Besides, why did the professor expect the carpenter to move and pile his books for him? Did he call a servant?
We would have to consciously replicate that since we are making an artifact.
Obviously, we can't know that unless and until an artificial construct demonstrates measurable aspects of consciousness.
Believing otherwise is just more of nature-is-an-idiot-and-we-can-do-better thinking
The opposite, actually. The idea that we can make something simple(ish) and somewhat open-ended or non-deterministic that can evolve through self organizing/emergent behavior depends on "nature" (broadly used here to include natural processes happening to and/or acting on an artificial construct) to do part of the work.
Boys in the band. A movie. You would have to expose it not just to the current environment, but evolutionary time environments to have an "android."
Interesting thought: If we (humans) construct a machine that you, according to your criteria, determine to be conscious, build an exact replica and expose it to the exact same inputs, is it the SAME consciousness, or unique?
The truth is, I don't even know if YOU are conscious. How can we ever know if a machine is conscious? I think it would end up being declared conscious for scientific and business and law reasons, not because it is.
I would not go so far to say "impossible", but there definitely is not reason to believe it is possible except a naive belief in the supremacy of technology over nature. At this time, the only reliable thing that can be said is "certainly not in the next 50 years", as a member of the IBM Watson team put it to me recently. And they should really know.
No, they should not really know. They are just guessing.
But we are not talking about "rolling the dice." We are talking about deliberately creating a human in a machine
Deliberately creating something could involve rolling the dice. The AlphaZero chess program can play chess better than any human, and was created by starting with an empty neural net, and letting it play against itself, after only being instructed with the basic rules of the game. It was a deliberate attempt to create a strong result, but no human needed to understand the exact way it would work. The designers only fed in broad concepts, and then let the thing develop itself.
Instead of a chess machine, you could make a similar, but bigger, version that sits inside a robot head, and can control cameras and limbs, and just experiments with input/output until it figures out what works and what doesn't. Start out with an empty system, and reward/punish it for certain behavior.
But we are not talking about "rolling the dice." We are talking about deliberately creating a human in a machine
Deliberately creating something could involve rolling the dice. The AlphaZero chess program can play chess better than any human, and was created by starting with an empty neural net, and letting it play against itself, after only being instructed with the basic rules of the game. It was a deliberate attempt to create a strong result, but no human needed to understand the exact way it would work. The designers only fed in broad concepts, and then let the thing develop itself.
Instead of a chess machine, you could make a similar, but bigger, version that sits inside a robot head, and can control cameras and limbs, and just experiments with input/output until it figures out what works and what doesn't. Start out with an empty system, and reward/punish it for certain behavior.
For how long? Four billion years? Maybe then you'd have an "android." And it would be constantly tested against our understanding of what it SHOULD be creating for an output. In other words, we would have to understand ourselves in detail.
What if we could make them like working all day cleaning our houses? Is that ethical? After all, they would be perfectly happy. It's a tough question we will eventually have to face, although probably after the horses have all run out of the barn.
There is no "happy" outside the HMA. "Happy" indicates we are doing what the HMA requires of us. It is the positive feedback signal in a cybernetic biological organism. The robot cleaning the house is merely executing a program.
You seem to be making a few assertions here that are simply your beliefs, but using them as facts to support your conclusion.
For instance, the notion that we can't replicate something that has evolved over millions or billions of years. (BTW, humans/pre-human ancestors only branched off from other hominid about 7.5 million years ago. The earliest estimates for life existing on Earth are about 3.8 billion years ago, so no, human consciousness was not evolving before single-celled organisms.) However, we have replicated bipedal locomotion in robots, despite that taking considerable time to evolve in our ancestors. So I'm not sure why you think mental processes cannot be replicated.
You also claim that humans will never understand human consciousness, but only cite a philosophical bon mot or two "a thing cannot make an artifact as complex as itself" and "you must know more about reality than the thing you are creating" that have a satisfying sound to them, but no evidence that they are actual "laws of the universe".
Here's another good one:"We perceive the internal states of others and react to those states by modifying our own behaviors.... The HMA will never be replicated in a machine for this reason." Except that robots and chatbots that observe and respond to human emotion already exist. And evidence suggests that they will be better at it than humans before long.
It seems to boil down to either "I can't conceive of how it is possible, so it must be impossible" or just "it's a really hard problem", neither of which is a compelling argument to me. There's another piece to it, also, that you may not have considered. You seem to be assuming that people, humans, need to fully understand consciousness and will then need to build it from scratch. However, you're overlooking the possibility that an advanced set of hardware and algorithms that forms a "thinking machine" of some type will develop consciousness on its own. Consider that evolution of organic entities takes a long time because many generations may be needed to fully develop the adaptive traits. Software is much more malleable. It can change in response to stimuli in real time and undergo hundreds of iterations of changes in less time than it takes a person to recharge as is required daily (sleep).
Machines might never achieve consciousness or emotion that is similar to humans, but it's way to early to declare it impossible.
Asimov's mistake I think. The assumption that things will just appear from programming complexity. The human being is an exquisite example of compromise and checks and balances over evolutionary time. We would have to consciously replicate that since we are making an artifact. And yes, we would have to understand the human machine completely to do that. Believing otherwise is just more of nature-is-an-idiot-and-we-can-do-better thinking that seems to exist in parts of the scientific community.
True intelligence, consciousness, awareness means the ability to act and make decisions outside the constraints of reflexes and programmed responses. Androids that are self-aware and intelligent therefore, by definition, cannot be forced to behave in a particular way. This is the inherent danger in building true AI.
Why would they WANT "to act and make decisions outside the constraints of reflexes and programmed responses?" They have to be motivated to act and make decisions. Quick, run to the corner and stand on your head. Why didn't you do that? We spend our lives building and executing a behavior-space to satisfy our complex, inborn, human, array of motivations. We don't do arbitrary things that have no point or purpose to us. No one is even talking about programming in a general robotic motivation array (RMA). They are talking about specific behaviors, unmotivated, in its behavior-space, and trusting that somehow motivated behavior will, (as Asimov seemed to me to assume) just pop out of intelligence. We (humans) program "intelligence" into machines, but we append it to our own HMA. We build the machine, turn it on, program it, determine its tasks, decide when it has or has not attained its goals, then turn it off. Like the Jeopardy computer. All to satisfy OUR motivations. It is all a behavior in OUR behavior-space.
IMHO, the central flaw to your reasoning is the assumption that we need to understand something 100% before we can create it. We can make a firework (and did) before we understood the chemistry that is involved in gunpowder. Evolution (the process that caused us to exist) is not conscious, it just rolls the dice and then applies a measure (survival) as to the value of the outcome. So the simple can create the (more) complex.
But we are not talking about "rolling the dice." We are talking about deliberately creating a human in a machine. That requires understanding. And gunpowder is not an artifact in the sense we are talking. It was merely trial and error. It was the observation of something happening. No one sat around with others and said, "Hey, let's create gunpowder," and then went and studied how to do it.
"Q: Can we make androids behave like humans, but without the selfishness and violence that appears in Westworld and other works of science fiction?
A: I certainly think so. I would hate to be wrong about this, but so much of human behavior has to do with evolutionary constraints. Things like competition for survival and for mating and for eating. This shapes every bit of our psychology. And so androids, not possessing that history, would certainly show up with a very different psychology. It would be more of an acting job -- they wouldn't necessarily have the same kind of emotions as us, if they had them period. And this is tied into the question of whether they would even have any consciousness -- any internal experience -- at all."
How naive people are. No, we can't. The Human Motivation Array is 4 billion years in the making. And who says selfishness and violence are bad? Not the evolutionary process certainly. They satisfy parts of the HMA and dissatisfy other parts at the same time. They are obviously necessary -- or they would not be there. They would have evolved out long ago. The complex, evolved HMA delineates a behavior-space that we share, - the nominal HMA - but differently accented subtly individual to individual (You can see this on the nightly news, especially the badly maimed HMAs.) You can see this by looking at us. We recognize that we are all human, but we recognize that we all look different. Our entire physicality is our motivation array as humans and as individuals. When you look in the mirror something 4 billion years in the making is looking back. And "Sault's law" (to order my thinking) states that a thing cannot make an artifact as complex as itself. It is an asymptotic goal requiring more and more effort and resources but never reaching the goal - like the speed of light. Why? Because you must know more about reality than the thing you are creating. We cannot know ourselves completely from the inside. Humans will always be able to tell when they are interacting with an android when they grow up around and interact with humans. We communicate each to the other the internal state of satisfaction of our complex motivation array through emotions. Emotions are the state indicators that evolution made for us to interact in groups. Groups are not possible without them. We perceive the internal states of others and react to those states by modifying our own behaviors - and we are motivated to do that if our motivation array is "normal." The HMA will never be replicated in a machine for this reason, we can't see it in detail. It keeps getting in the way of our thoughts and perceptions of reality. Like putting a "colony" on Mars. We cannot bootstrap ourselves. Remember that scientists have said that 100 Billion humans and things that can be called humans have existed. There are seven billion of us today. With the snap of the fingers we will all be gone and replaced by billions more. And more, and more, and more....We are cells in the body of the evolving human species. We are a construction of nature over billions of years. We will not be able to replicate that.
And I've been recently thinking that our very fuzzy perception of the existence of the HMA is what we call "God."
Instead of females creatively aggressing their way to equal numbers the hyper-liberal thinks we have to artificially level the percentage participation. All that will do is allow a politically correct level of mediocrity. And "pale?" Wow. Does the hyper-liberal EVER perceive racism in himself? Can one say there is too much "dark" in rap? Of course not. Cameron is just another mindless male sociopathic feminist and a POC (person of color) racist fellow-traveler.
However, I've known the Drake equation to be nonsense since I read it in "Intelligent Life in the Universe," which I read so many decades ago in my teens. You can't multiply guesses together like that and expect to get anything out but science fiction. Drake didn't even know if there are OTHER variables that are important. Which ones yous say? That's my point. We don't know. And let's stop this "dolphins-are-intelligent" thing. Why? Because they form primitive groups, quack to each other like Flipper and play with seaweed? When they write a sonnet and fly to the moon etc. I'll consider them "intelligent." The same for other animals. It is what they can do and want to do naturally that defines their intelligence, not what you can train them to do after a million dollars of training. The bar for something to be considered intelligent has been placed far to low - same for so-called AI.
A previous industrial civilization would have depleted the fossil fuel supply of the Earth to a degree that probably would have been perceivable and even not to have allowed our present industrial society to develop.
I suspect that the evolution of what I would call bio-genetic (just to order my own thoughts) processes were not mature enough to allow for intelligent life in the past and the further back you go the less capable the genetic engine of life was of creating a complex intelligent form. We are 4 billion years old. Our bio-genetic advance is that old.
Is your toaster a person too? How about your fridge? Want to spend your life and resources in court suing your appliances? And they can't get married--TODAY. But what about tomorrow, since this is just a bridge law or regulation? I'm not kidding. If there is advantage to your machines being persons, and there is advantage to them being married, expect eventually that it will be allowed for machines to be married. And corrupt and incompetent legislatures will allow it too. And if it is a person that you can sue, it is a person that can sue YOU. Want to be sued by everything in your daily life? Want to go through your life fearful of the financial consequences to you of crossing some MACHINE?! This is really just another attempt to allow machines to kill you and for manufacturers of these artifacts to deny all responsibility for your death. What if you had to sue your car and not FORD during the ignition switch debacle recently? Would there have been any incentive to fix the problem on the part of ford? Of course not. Sue HIM/HER (but not IT, the machine)! And this doesn't even address the busy-courts problem. Do we really want the court calendar clogged up with machine suits? We already have to be careful around people to an extraordinary degree. Do we have to tiptoe around our machines too?
Because the instinct to defend and protect is male. The will-to-kill is male. The creative aggression of our species is male. If you don't believe that, read more history, more tech history, more political history, watch more news. Females CAN pull triggers. Males WANT to pull triggers. The spirit and power of the thing is lost when you put females in male positions in such things. But it will be done. That is the zeitgeist. Then they will wonder why it didn't work so well, like Mad Max: Fury Road. I have no doubt a male in the lead there would have driven the box office higher. Look to the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. They could have destroyed that too by feminizing it, but they didn't. Make Harry Potter a girl? Wouldn't work. We know the massive success that had with both boys AND girls. Can you do the politically correct thing and "same-size" males and females? Sure, but you pay a price for the lie, and you suffer at the box office for it. The male on male conflict dynamic would be lost. Yes, you CAN put females in male positions, but should you? No.
I have to disagree. The story is basically male and there is a strong element of breeding certain males to certain females to bring about a higher level of abilities. If you change males to females, you lose that thread and actually make it ridiculous.
Even though I'm getting pretty old, it will be interesting to see how they handle a story that takes place so much in the mind. Foundation was one of my very favorite scifi stories growing up. Come to think of it, they will probably have to update the tone for our gender-equal times. Actually, they will make the lead characters women,and the story multicultural and alien friendly. I predict a Political Correctness lecture will result and so an abject failure.
It is a totally unrealistic requirement that one be fully attentive while on autopilot. It is impossible and moots autopilot completely. This argument is just another step toward allowing machines to kill people. Musk knows this. He is not unintelligent, thus, he must be deliberately agitating for machines to be allowed to kill people so he can sell more machines. What do they call a callous, remorseless, conscious-less, manipulative person? This is the same guy who wants to send people to Mars to die for the greater glory of Elon Musk. You know what to call such a person.
Dinosaurs were changing with their environments for many millions of years and suddenly they all got poisoned? I don't buy it. I suggest it has more to do with the rise of mammals. Perhaps mammals were destroying their ground-based nests, eating their eggs. It would give impetus to a move into the trees. Those who moved survived to this day as birds. Those who didn't became extinct. Further, notice where many birds go to have land-based nests. These locations are usually far and desolate to protect against predators -- mammals.
Slashdot Mirror
You could do just as well with better word choice (and order):
At the business conference, the envious Janet looked at Amelia, then put out her hand with a bright smile.
So where's the hate?
Ever taken a ruler and held it over the bottom half of a line of text and been surprised that you can still easily read it? If we cut letters in two we can increase the amount of information on a page and probably be able to what I would call "chunk read," or absorb information and meaning more quickly. It would make, I think, the "parafoveal" capture of extra characters easier. Also, we need to progress to an "emotional alphabet," something like: "a" with a following up arrow indicating rising anger, "j" with a down arrow indicating decreasing jealousy, "h" with an equal sign indicating a sustaining level of hate, etc. It could be much more complicated and subtle. I called it "emotional algebra" to order my thinking. Don't tell me about emoticons. They are for children.
Janet looked at Amelia and smiled brightly while putting out her hand at the business conference. (without emotional algebra, just a couple of actions)
Janet looked at Amelia and smiled brightly while putting out her hand at the business conference. (j,h{up arrow}) [And now we know her internal state while she performed those actions]
How many people in the university actually live and work in the outside world, the real, physical world? Not many. So, they don't understand or appreciate the critical necessity for people who do, the carpenters, mechanics, technicians etc., people who can and do get things done with their hands. Not understanding means not appreciating means not valuing means not funding and manning properly the positions. It would be more economical and understandable to them to hire one essentially useless desk-sitting, phone- manning, "Dean of Apologizing," than to hire the correct number of carpenters. Must keep the budget down after all. And while the task the professor wants accomplished seems important to him the carpenter may just have looked it over and determined it was way down his list of priorities in his busy work day. Bookshelf for some entitled professor? Nope, not now. Besides, why did the professor expect the carpenter to move and pile his books for him? Did he call a servant?
Will they find out in 50 years that it causes cancer or some other disease and have to require it all be ripped out at huge expense--like asbestos?
Boys From Brazil. Lol, my mistake. I got the "boys" mixed up.
We would have to consciously replicate that since we are making an artifact.
Obviously, we can't know that unless and until an artificial construct demonstrates measurable aspects of consciousness.
Believing otherwise is just more of nature-is-an-idiot-and-we-can-do-better thinking
The opposite, actually. The idea that we can make something simple(ish) and somewhat open-ended or non-deterministic that can evolve through self organizing/emergent behavior depends on "nature" (broadly used here to include natural processes happening to and/or acting on an artificial construct) to do part of the work.
Boys in the band. A movie. You would have to expose it not just to the current environment, but evolutionary time environments to have an "android."
Interesting thought: If we (humans) construct a machine that you, according to your criteria, determine to be conscious, build an exact replica and expose it to the exact same inputs, is it the SAME consciousness, or unique?
The truth is, I don't even know if YOU are conscious. How can we ever know if a machine is conscious? I think it would end up being declared conscious for scientific and business and law reasons, not because it is.
A tail would be "good enough" to help me in making a sandwich, but it is not necessary. And nature did away with it.
I would not go so far to say "impossible", but there definitely is not reason to believe it is possible except a naive belief in the supremacy of technology over nature. At this time, the only reliable thing that can be said is "certainly not in the next 50 years", as a member of the IBM Watson team put it to me recently. And they should really know.
No, they should not really know. They are just guessing.
But we are not talking about "rolling the dice." We are talking about deliberately creating a human in a machine
Deliberately creating something could involve rolling the dice. The AlphaZero chess program can play chess better than any human, and was created by starting with an empty neural net, and letting it play against itself, after only being instructed with the basic rules of the game. It was a deliberate attempt to create a strong result, but no human needed to understand the exact way it would work. The designers only fed in broad concepts, and then let the thing develop itself.
Instead of a chess machine, you could make a similar, but bigger, version that sits inside a robot head, and can control cameras and limbs, and just experiments with input/output until it figures out what works and what doesn't. Start out with an empty system, and reward/punish it for certain behavior.
But we are not talking about "rolling the dice." We are talking about deliberately creating a human in a machine
Deliberately creating something could involve rolling the dice. The AlphaZero chess program can play chess better than any human, and was created by starting with an empty neural net, and letting it play against itself, after only being instructed with the basic rules of the game. It was a deliberate attempt to create a strong result, but no human needed to understand the exact way it would work. The designers only fed in broad concepts, and then let the thing develop itself.
Instead of a chess machine, you could make a similar, but bigger, version that sits inside a robot head, and can control cameras and limbs, and just experiments with input/output until it figures out what works and what doesn't. Start out with an empty system, and reward/punish it for certain behavior.
For how long? Four billion years? Maybe then you'd have an "android." And it would be constantly tested against our understanding of what it SHOULD be creating for an output. In other words, we would have to understand ourselves in detail.
What if we could make them like working all day cleaning our houses? Is that ethical? After all, they would be perfectly happy. It's a tough question we will eventually have to face, although probably after the horses have all run out of the barn.
There is no "happy" outside the HMA. "Happy" indicates we are doing what the HMA requires of us. It is the positive feedback signal in a cybernetic biological organism. The robot cleaning the house is merely executing a program.
You seem to be making a few assertions here that are simply your beliefs, but using them as facts to support your conclusion.
It seems to boil down to either "I can't conceive of how it is possible, so it must be impossible" or just "it's a really hard problem", neither of which is a compelling argument to me. There's another piece to it, also, that you may not have considered. You seem to be assuming that people, humans, need to fully understand consciousness and will then need to build it from scratch. However, you're overlooking the possibility that an advanced set of hardware and algorithms that forms a "thinking machine" of some type will develop consciousness on its own. Consider that evolution of organic entities takes a long time because many generations may be needed to fully develop the adaptive traits. Software is much more malleable. It can change in response to stimuli in real time and undergo hundreds of iterations of changes in less time than it takes a person to recharge as is required daily (sleep).
Machines might never achieve consciousness or emotion that is similar to humans, but it's way to early to declare it impossible.
Asimov's mistake I think. The assumption that things will just appear from programming complexity. The human being is an exquisite example of compromise and checks and balances over evolutionary time. We would have to consciously replicate that since we are making an artifact. And yes, we would have to understand the human machine completely to do that. Believing otherwise is just more of nature-is-an-idiot-and-we-can-do-better thinking that seems to exist in parts of the scientific community.
True intelligence, consciousness, awareness means the ability to act and make decisions outside the constraints of reflexes and programmed responses. Androids that are self-aware and intelligent therefore, by definition, cannot be forced to behave in a particular way. This is the inherent danger in building true AI.
Why would they WANT "to act and make decisions outside the constraints of reflexes and programmed responses?" They have to be motivated to act and make decisions. Quick, run to the corner and stand on your head. Why didn't you do that? We spend our lives building and executing a behavior-space to satisfy our complex, inborn, human, array of motivations. We don't do arbitrary things that have no point or purpose to us. No one is even talking about programming in a general robotic motivation array (RMA). They are talking about specific behaviors, unmotivated, in its behavior-space, and trusting that somehow motivated behavior will, (as Asimov seemed to me to assume) just pop out of intelligence. We (humans) program "intelligence" into machines, but we append it to our own HMA. We build the machine, turn it on, program it, determine its tasks, decide when it has or has not attained its goals, then turn it off. Like the Jeopardy computer. All to satisfy OUR motivations. It is all a behavior in OUR behavior-space.
IMHO, the central flaw to your reasoning is the assumption that we need to understand something 100% before we can create it. We can make a firework (and did) before we understood the chemistry that is involved in gunpowder. Evolution (the process that caused us to exist) is not conscious, it just rolls the dice and then applies a measure (survival) as to the value of the outcome. So the simple can create the (more) complex.
But we are not talking about "rolling the dice." We are talking about deliberately creating a human in a machine. That requires understanding. And gunpowder is not an artifact in the sense we are talking. It was merely trial and error. It was the observation of something happening. No one sat around with others and said, "Hey, let's create gunpowder," and then went and studied how to do it.
"Q: Can we make androids behave like humans, but without the selfishness and violence that appears in Westworld and other works of science fiction? A: I certainly think so. I would hate to be wrong about this, but so much of human behavior has to do with evolutionary constraints. Things like competition for survival and for mating and for eating. This shapes every bit of our psychology. And so androids, not possessing that history, would certainly show up with a very different psychology. It would be more of an acting job -- they wouldn't necessarily have the same kind of emotions as us, if they had them period. And this is tied into the question of whether they would even have any consciousness -- any internal experience -- at all."
How naive people are. No, we can't. The Human Motivation Array is 4 billion years in the making. And who says selfishness and violence are bad? Not the evolutionary process certainly. They satisfy parts of the HMA and dissatisfy other parts at the same time. They are obviously necessary -- or they would not be there. They would have evolved out long ago. The complex, evolved HMA delineates a behavior-space that we share, - the nominal HMA - but differently accented subtly individual to individual (You can see this on the nightly news, especially the badly maimed HMAs.) You can see this by looking at us. We recognize that we are all human, but we recognize that we all look different. Our entire physicality is our motivation array as humans and as individuals. When you look in the mirror something 4 billion years in the making is looking back. And "Sault's law" (to order my thinking) states that a thing cannot make an artifact as complex as itself. It is an asymptotic goal requiring more and more effort and resources but never reaching the goal - like the speed of light. Why? Because you must know more about reality than the thing you are creating. We cannot know ourselves completely from the inside. Humans will always be able to tell when they are interacting with an android when they grow up around and interact with humans. We communicate each to the other the internal state of satisfaction of our complex motivation array through emotions. Emotions are the state indicators that evolution made for us to interact in groups. Groups are not possible without them. We perceive the internal states of others and react to those states by modifying our own behaviors - and we are motivated to do that if our motivation array is "normal." The HMA will never be replicated in a machine for this reason, we can't see it in detail. It keeps getting in the way of our thoughts and perceptions of reality. Like putting a "colony" on Mars. We cannot bootstrap ourselves. Remember that scientists have said that 100 Billion humans and things that can be called humans have existed. There are seven billion of us today. With the snap of the fingers we will all be gone and replaced by billions more. And more, and more, and more....We are cells in the body of the evolving human species. We are a construction of nature over billions of years. We will not be able to replicate that.
And I've been recently thinking that our very fuzzy perception of the existence of the HMA is what we call "God."
Instead of females creatively aggressing their way to equal numbers the hyper-liberal thinks we have to artificially level the percentage participation. All that will do is allow a politically correct level of mediocrity. And "pale?" Wow. Does the hyper-liberal EVER perceive racism in himself? Can one say there is too much "dark" in rap? Of course not. Cameron is just another mindless male sociopathic feminist and a POC (person of color) racist fellow-traveler.
If the tiny EMAG energy of a cellphone is supposed to cause brain cancer, how can 300kW blasted at you NOT do something deleterious??
Perhaps you can write a sonnet without a million dollars of training, but I'd like you try flying to the moon without a million bucks...
No one outside the human species trains us to go to the moon. That is something we do ourselves. That is the point.
However, I've known the Drake equation to be nonsense since I read it in "Intelligent Life in the Universe," which I read so many decades ago in my teens. You can't multiply guesses together like that and expect to get anything out but science fiction. Drake didn't even know if there are OTHER variables that are important. Which ones yous say? That's my point. We don't know. And let's stop this "dolphins-are-intelligent" thing. Why? Because they form primitive groups, quack to each other like Flipper and play with seaweed? When they write a sonnet and fly to the moon etc. I'll consider them "intelligent." The same for other animals. It is what they can do and want to do naturally that defines their intelligence, not what you can train them to do after a million dollars of training. The bar for something to be considered intelligent has been placed far to low - same for so-called AI.
A previous industrial civilization would have depleted the fossil fuel supply of the Earth to a degree that probably would have been perceivable and even not to have allowed our present industrial society to develop.
I suspect that the evolution of what I would call bio-genetic (just to order my own thoughts) processes were not mature enough to allow for intelligent life in the past and the further back you go the less capable the genetic engine of life was of creating a complex intelligent form. We are 4 billion years old. Our bio-genetic advance is that old.
Or am I naive in thinking that this is really really hard to do and is bound to fail expensively?
Is your toaster a person too? How about your fridge? Want to spend your life and resources in court suing your appliances? And they can't get married--TODAY. But what about tomorrow, since this is just a bridge law or regulation? I'm not kidding. If there is advantage to your machines being persons, and there is advantage to them being married, expect eventually that it will be allowed for machines to be married. And corrupt and incompetent legislatures will allow it too. And if it is a person that you can sue, it is a person that can sue YOU. Want to be sued by everything in your daily life? Want to go through your life fearful of the financial consequences to you of crossing some MACHINE?! This is really just another attempt to allow machines to kill you and for manufacturers of these artifacts to deny all responsibility for your death. What if you had to sue your car and not FORD during the ignition switch debacle recently? Would there have been any incentive to fix the problem on the part of ford? Of course not. Sue HIM/HER (but not IT, the machine)! And this doesn't even address the busy-courts problem. Do we really want the court calendar clogged up with machine suits? We already have to be careful around people to an extraordinary degree. Do we have to tiptoe around our machines too?
Because the instinct to defend and protect is male. The will-to-kill is male. The creative aggression of our species is male. If you don't believe that, read more history, more tech history, more political history, watch more news. Females CAN pull triggers. Males WANT to pull triggers. The spirit and power of the thing is lost when you put females in male positions in such things. But it will be done. That is the zeitgeist. Then they will wonder why it didn't work so well, like Mad Max: Fury Road. I have no doubt a male in the lead there would have driven the box office higher. Look to the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. They could have destroyed that too by feminizing it, but they didn't. Make Harry Potter a girl? Wouldn't work. We know the massive success that had with both boys AND girls. Can you do the politically correct thing and "same-size" males and females? Sure, but you pay a price for the lie, and you suffer at the box office for it. The male on male conflict dynamic would be lost. Yes, you CAN put females in male positions, but should you? No.
I have to disagree. The story is basically male and there is a strong element of breeding certain males to certain females to bring about a higher level of abilities. If you change males to females, you lose that thread and actually make it ridiculous.
Even though I'm getting pretty old, it will be interesting to see how they handle a story that takes place so much in the mind. Foundation was one of my very favorite scifi stories growing up. Come to think of it, they will probably have to update the tone for our gender-equal times. Actually, they will make the lead characters women,and the story multicultural and alien friendly. I predict a Political Correctness lecture will result and so an abject failure.
It is a totally unrealistic requirement that one be fully attentive while on autopilot. It is impossible and moots autopilot completely. This argument is just another step toward allowing machines to kill people. Musk knows this. He is not unintelligent, thus, he must be deliberately agitating for machines to be allowed to kill people so he can sell more machines. What do they call a callous, remorseless, conscious-less, manipulative person? This is the same guy who wants to send people to Mars to die for the greater glory of Elon Musk. You know what to call such a person.
Dinosaurs were changing with their environments for many millions of years and suddenly they all got poisoned? I don't buy it. I suggest it has more to do with the rise of mammals. Perhaps mammals were destroying their ground-based nests, eating their eggs. It would give impetus to a move into the trees. Those who moved survived to this day as birds. Those who didn't became extinct. Further, notice where many birds go to have land-based nests. These locations are usually far and desolate to protect against predators -- mammals.