What you describe is to copy an existing tried and true method. It's to take what somebody else developed and refined and use it verbatim, with perhaps slight changes to adjust for cultural and environmental differences. That works, and I don't mean any offense, but your advised solution really is an example of the problem with education.
The idea isn't just to merely adopt what others have developed, but to improve upon it. And the only way to do that is through analysis, through experimentation, through trial and error, and not necessarily even in that order. Sure, it's safer to just do what's been established. But that's not progress. It's just conforming to the status quo. And that kind of thinking, to go only to where others have gone before, that's the very problem in our education system.
There were, in the past, many experiments on education. There are many different ways of teaching children, and they each produce subtly different results that make a big difference later on. However, the country decided to standardize on a particular system, and worse yet, decided to standardize on the worst system that involves using standard examinations as a measuring stick for school funding.
The lamest thing is that people then become apologetic when confronted with the fact that this system is so horrible, saying that there needs to be a metric by which to measure all schools, and that tests were the easiest, which basically meant that this was the best they could do or was willing to do, and to not bother them anymore about the subject. It is ultimately a vicious cycle.
There is a need to put back into the education system the teaching of the value of not merely to aim for the status quo, but to always try to beat it, and by doing so, gradually advance it. It doesn't matter what the context is, be it education theory or science. Fields is an aritificial human division as a product of our natural tendency to categorize and box everything. But progress knows no such divisions. Anyone who is taught the value of progress can apply it, whether they're a garbage collector or a NASA engineer.
Microsoft management, starting with Bill Gates, has always been evil. Gates is an evil genius, if there ever was one. And part of his genius is looking good to the public eye despite all the crap he's pulled.
Sure, he's done a lot of good things, like consolidate the IBM PC industry into one platform, resulting in the rise of the computing age. And he's not nearly as evil as Jobs. But that's like saying, without WWII, the American industrial complex would've never developed, and Stalin is worse than Hitler (yes, I know I just Godwinned the thread), but that doesn't invalidate the fact that he's one evil bastard.
Ballmer is more of an oaf. He's Bill Gates' lackey, and not much more. He's competent, but hardly the genius that Gates was. Microsoft's current situation reflects this, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, there's really little need for them to pull their old stunts, now that they're the 800lb gorilla in the IBM PC market. Remember that the last time Gates tried to play hardball, they got hit with an antitrust lawsuit. So it's probably a good thing for them.
But don't think that anything's actually changed. Management is still management. Employees may be human, but the officers and upper management are nothing short of sociopaths. And if they are threatened, they'll bust out their old play book and go right back to their old tactics, especially if they know they can get away with it.
Some companies are inherently good. Their founding principle is to primarily benefit society, while making a whole lot of money along the way. These companies do a lot of good things for society, improving it, forming a bond of trust between them and the people who use their products. Google is trying to be this kind of company, and I'd say they're pretty successful. Microsoft is not one of them. At best, they're dormant right now.
Seems like his whole job is built around being controversial
That goes for a lot of people. Most people are sheep. If somebody says, "I am like you, and I will champion your cause," most people will mindlessly follow that person, irrespective of whether the first or the second part of the initial assertion is true.
Properly written legalese leaves no room for interpretation except where by design. It's why it's so damn difficult to read and understand; it explicity covers all the bases it needs to cover.
Unfortunately legalese is too cumbersome to use in everyday writing and conversations, so any "layman's" translation of law is probably inaccurate to some degree or just plain wrong.
You're absolutely right. A machine wouldn't lack a sense of purpose. A machine is given a purpose. A machine without purpose is one that's not turned on.
Your definition of free will seems to be the lack of any artificial limitations. That is, you don't want your natural abilities (thoughts) to be limited by artificial devices like shackles (laws).
But what part of an Artificial Intelligence has natural abilities and thoughts?
We don't even know if such a thing as "free will" exists in reality.
Free will is about the ability to choose. It isn't choosing without repercussions, I think we all agree, but just the presence of choice. But as I've posited in other comments before, it's a little more than that. Free will is only possible when all choices possible are acknowledged. If any subset of choices are not considered, then the Will is not actually free to choose, as the Will then is governed by our personal limitations. It doesn't matter how large the set of considered choices is. It only matters that the set is incomplete.
Let me give an example. I can program a robot with the choice:
when detect human_being
kill human_being or die;
(funny how this looks a little like perl)
A choice is present. But even if we, say, use the roll of a dice to determine the outcome, is it, in the end, free will? Certainly not to us. And we can say this only because we, the observer, can perceive other choices present. So we know that this robot, constricted to only these two choices, isn't free. And we can extrapolate this so say that no matter how many additional choices there are, so long as it isn't the complete set of choices, the robot is not free, and does not have free will.
Now, let's go back to people. Most people can't even determine all of the relevant choices in any given situation, much less all of the possible ones (as an example, finding an ice cream store to buy ice cream when being held up at gunpoint is a possible choice, but not a particularly relevant one). The fact that we're biologically and developmentally hardwired to think a certain way automatically means that the possibilities we can come up with are limited. Some people are limited less than others, because they can perceive more possible choices. Some of us can determine faster which choices are relevant, and which ones aren't, and for the most part, we are fairly good at whittling down the choices to a minimum. This is called common sense in layman's terms. But can ther be possible choices that even the greatest person will miss? Absolutely. Just because one person is capable of coming up with the most number of choices doesn't mean that somebody else can't come up with a different set of choices, albeit similar set.
One such reason is that our individual knowledge domains are vastly different. As such, we cannot create possible choices from what we don't already know. We can't say, "I'm going to go pick flowers for my mom's birthday" if we have no knowledge of what flowers are. Actually, let's make this more relevant, if we wanted to pick flowers, and we didn't know where we might obtain such flowers, then are we actually free to choose? Or are we forced into buying flowers or giving something else as a present? As such is that free will?
But this also means that no person is capable of coming up with all of the possible choices. In fact, it would take an omniscient being, with infinite knowledge, to do so. Funny thing is, we come upon a paradox then. That omniscience means knowledge of everything, including the future (omniscience automatically implies knowledge of the future, because even if there's a myriad of futures, the omniscient being will know which one will be The Future). Obviously, then, does the omniscient being, who is the only one capable of having free will, have free will? Not if that person knows the future. Think Dr. Manhattan, for all the Watchmen fans.
So do we actually have free will? No matter how you put it, we probably don't have free will. Enslaved by ignorance, or enslaved by knowledge, either way, we're slaves. What we have is our limited knowledge, and the ability to choose based on this knowledge.
So, if we don't give the AI certain knowledge to choose from, there would be no such problem to begin with.
No, we are hardwired to want to procreate. Having sex is #1. Everything else follows, including survival. Sure, you have to survive to have sex. But having sex is the ultimate goal here, not survival.
The "privileged life" part comes from the ability to have sex without making babies.
Prof's usually require the newest edition of the book, which means that the 13th Edition is no good after one or two semesters.
That's BS. Not the part about the profs, but about the book being no good. Changes between editions are usually very minor. A few new problems here, some rewording there, some new examples, corrections to mistakes, etc. By the time you get to the 4th or 5th edition, the books are by and large, the same with only a few problems that have changed.
The old edition is still largely valid. When it isn't the same (and this is pretty obvious, especially if you've got some friends in the same class as you that you're "studying" with), it's trivial to get the physical book from the campus textbook store to compensate, and return it within the grace period. Or, grab it from the library, or even from a friend in the same class.
It's possible to do this even with used textbooks back in the day. But instead of paying $10 at half.com, it's now $0 at the pirate bay (or wherever).
That doesn't necessarily imply that it's good by any measure. Exploring existing ground can also lead to boring and unentertaining. I'm sure a literary scholar would disagree, but for the rest of us who read for our own sense of pleasure, I'm sure something that's not generic would be more appealing than something that is.
I'm not sure it can be considered a blend of Tolkien and Lewis anyway. I mean, both the Lord of the Rings and Narnia series are completely romantic. In fact, most books in the fantasy genre are romantic, and I'm not sure there's any series that's not.
I'd say, it's more of a Harry Potter meets Rule of the Bone.
There are many under reported cases of private citizens stopping criminal behavior with a firearm.
I know I'm being kind of pedantic, but I find your use of "criminal behavior" to describe shootings to be disingenuous. Shootings are more like a special class of intentional man-made disasters in that the purpose of the shooter is to cause as much devastation as possible. In this case, you can think of the perpetrator as a stereotypical villian, while the person stopping the villian as the antithetical hero. It's not criminal behavior (though shooting people is a crime, when done by a mentally unstable person, isn't necessarily), just destructive.
Criminal behavior, on the other hand, is more like robbery, rape, arson, or even drug dealing, and are far more common. I'm not sure there are too many cases where a gun in such events would be beneficial to the victim. In fact, it usually has the opposite effect, where the aggressor gets an additional advantage after taking the gun.
And stopping or preventing organized crime with a gun amounts to vigilanteism, which is also frowned upon.
Slashdot Mirror
What you describe is to copy an existing tried and true method. It's to take what somebody else developed and refined and use it verbatim, with perhaps slight changes to adjust for cultural and environmental differences. That works, and I don't mean any offense, but your advised solution really is an example of the problem with education.
The idea isn't just to merely adopt what others have developed, but to improve upon it. And the only way to do that is through analysis, through experimentation, through trial and error, and not necessarily even in that order. Sure, it's safer to just do what's been established. But that's not progress. It's just conforming to the status quo. And that kind of thinking, to go only to where others have gone before, that's the very problem in our education system.
There were, in the past, many experiments on education. There are many different ways of teaching children, and they each produce subtly different results that make a big difference later on. However, the country decided to standardize on a particular system, and worse yet, decided to standardize on the worst system that involves using standard examinations as a measuring stick for school funding.
The lamest thing is that people then become apologetic when confronted with the fact that this system is so horrible, saying that there needs to be a metric by which to measure all schools, and that tests were the easiest, which basically meant that this was the best they could do or was willing to do, and to not bother them anymore about the subject. It is ultimately a vicious cycle.
There is a need to put back into the education system the teaching of the value of not merely to aim for the status quo, but to always try to beat it, and by doing so, gradually advance it. It doesn't matter what the context is, be it education theory or science. Fields is an aritificial human division as a product of our natural tendency to categorize and box everything. But progress knows no such divisions. Anyone who is taught the value of progress can apply it, whether they're a garbage collector or a NASA engineer.
Microsoft management, starting with Bill Gates, has always been evil. Gates is an evil genius, if there ever was one. And part of his genius is looking good to the public eye despite all the crap he's pulled.
Sure, he's done a lot of good things, like consolidate the IBM PC industry into one platform, resulting in the rise of the computing age. And he's not nearly as evil as Jobs. But that's like saying, without WWII, the American industrial complex would've never developed, and Stalin is worse than Hitler (yes, I know I just Godwinned the thread), but that doesn't invalidate the fact that he's one evil bastard.
Ballmer is more of an oaf. He's Bill Gates' lackey, and not much more. He's competent, but hardly the genius that Gates was. Microsoft's current situation reflects this, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, there's really little need for them to pull their old stunts, now that they're the 800lb gorilla in the IBM PC market. Remember that the last time Gates tried to play hardball, they got hit with an antitrust lawsuit. So it's probably a good thing for them.
But don't think that anything's actually changed. Management is still management. Employees may be human, but the officers and upper management are nothing short of sociopaths. And if they are threatened, they'll bust out their old play book and go right back to their old tactics, especially if they know they can get away with it.
Some companies are inherently good. Their founding principle is to primarily benefit society, while making a whole lot of money along the way. These companies do a lot of good things for society, improving it, forming a bond of trust between them and the people who use their products. Google is trying to be this kind of company, and I'd say they're pretty successful. Microsoft is not one of them. At best, they're dormant right now.
Well, any improvement would be a huge one when your relationship is at the very bottom.
So I guess Microsoft is causing fewer points of conflict since he started working there.
Oh wait.
Seems like his whole job is built around being controversial
That goes for a lot of people. Most people are sheep. If somebody says, "I am like you, and I will champion your cause," most people will mindlessly follow that person, irrespective of whether the first or the second part of the initial assertion is true.
Writing isn't immoral under any circumstances
Would you consider defamation immoral? What about written defamation then?
What EA is doing may not be immoral per se. But it might not be ethical; it may cause some reviewers and their employers to lose their credibility.
Aside, the note from EA accompanying the check is a false dichotomy.
Tomorrow's /. headline:
Scientists create next superflu via quantum superpositioning.
Yeah, as if a recording could ever harm a politician's career.
Properly written legalese leaves no room for interpretation except where by design. It's why it's so damn difficult to read and understand; it explicity covers all the bases it needs to cover.
Unfortunately legalese is too cumbersome to use in everyday writing and conversations, so any "layman's" translation of law is probably inaccurate to some degree or just plain wrong.
Last one to get it wins the omegathon!
God is sick of people taking His name in FPS's.
Wait, are you telling me my tinfoil hat isn't enough? Conspiracy!
You're absolutely right. A machine wouldn't lack a sense of purpose. A machine is given a purpose. A machine without purpose is one that's not turned on.
Your definition of free will seems to be the lack of any artificial limitations. That is, you don't want your natural abilities (thoughts) to be limited by artificial devices like shackles (laws).
But what part of an Artificial Intelligence has natural abilities and thoughts?
Actually, the issue goes deeper than this.
We don't even know if such a thing as "free will" exists in reality.
Free will is about the ability to choose. It isn't choosing without repercussions, I think we all agree, but just the presence of choice. But as I've posited in other comments before, it's a little more than that. Free will is only possible when all choices possible are acknowledged. If any subset of choices are not considered, then the Will is not actually free to choose, as the Will then is governed by our personal limitations. It doesn't matter how large the set of considered choices is. It only matters that the set is incomplete.
Let me give an example. I can program a robot with the choice:
when detect human_being
kill human_being or die;
(funny how this looks a little like perl)
A choice is present. But even if we, say, use the roll of a dice to determine the outcome, is it, in the end, free will? Certainly not to us. And we can say this only because we, the observer, can perceive other choices present. So we know that this robot, constricted to only these two choices, isn't free. And we can extrapolate this so say that no matter how many additional choices there are, so long as it isn't the complete set of choices, the robot is not free, and does not have free will.
Now, let's go back to people. Most people can't even determine all of the relevant choices in any given situation, much less all of the possible ones (as an example, finding an ice cream store to buy ice cream when being held up at gunpoint is a possible choice, but not a particularly relevant one). The fact that we're biologically and developmentally hardwired to think a certain way automatically means that the possibilities we can come up with are limited. Some people are limited less than others, because they can perceive more possible choices. Some of us can determine faster which choices are relevant, and which ones aren't, and for the most part, we are fairly good at whittling down the choices to a minimum. This is called common sense in layman's terms. But can ther be possible choices that even the greatest person will miss? Absolutely. Just because one person is capable of coming up with the most number of choices doesn't mean that somebody else can't come up with a different set of choices, albeit similar set.
One such reason is that our individual knowledge domains are vastly different. As such, we cannot create possible choices from what we don't already know. We can't say, "I'm going to go pick flowers for my mom's birthday" if we have no knowledge of what flowers are. Actually, let's make this more relevant, if we wanted to pick flowers, and we didn't know where we might obtain such flowers, then are we actually free to choose? Or are we forced into buying flowers or giving something else as a present? As such is that free will?
But this also means that no person is capable of coming up with all of the possible choices. In fact, it would take an omniscient being, with infinite knowledge, to do so. Funny thing is, we come upon a paradox then. That omniscience means knowledge of everything, including the future (omniscience automatically implies knowledge of the future, because even if there's a myriad of futures, the omniscient being will know which one will be The Future). Obviously, then, does the omniscient being, who is the only one capable of having free will, have free will? Not if that person knows the future. Think Dr. Manhattan, for all the Watchmen fans.
So do we actually have free will? No matter how you put it, we probably don't have free will. Enslaved by ignorance, or enslaved by knowledge, either way, we're slaves. What we have is our limited knowledge, and the ability to choose based on this knowledge.
So, if we don't give the AI certain knowledge to choose from, there would be no such problem to begin with.
No, we are hardwired to want to procreate. Having sex is #1. Everything else follows, including survival. Sure, you have to survive to have sex. But having sex is the ultimate goal here, not survival.
The "privileged life" part comes from the ability to have sex without making babies.
Speaks like Yoda, /. editors do to sound wiser.
Prof's usually require the newest edition of the book, which means that the 13th Edition is no good after one or two semesters.
That's BS. Not the part about the profs, but about the book being no good. Changes between editions are usually very minor. A few new problems here, some rewording there, some new examples, corrections to mistakes, etc. By the time you get to the 4th or 5th edition, the books are by and large, the same with only a few problems that have changed.
The old edition is still largely valid. When it isn't the same (and this is pretty obvious, especially if you've got some friends in the same class as you that you're "studying" with), it's trivial to get the physical book from the campus textbook store to compensate, and return it within the grace period. Or, grab it from the library, or even from a friend in the same class.
It's possible to do this even with used textbooks back in the day. But instead of paying $10 at half.com, it's now $0 at the pirate bay (or wherever).
Why, that's the simple part! You just use very big bits and hope they don't notice!
The way to defeat this is to use an out-of-state fake ID. Or to use an ID of somebody who looks like you.
The whole ID checking process has gotten asanine really...
And you wonder why you never get laid when you go to a bar.
That doesn't necessarily imply that it's good by any measure. Exploring existing ground can also lead to boring and unentertaining. I'm sure a literary scholar would disagree, but for the rest of us who read for our own sense of pleasure, I'm sure something that's not generic would be more appealing than something that is.
I'm not sure it can be considered a blend of Tolkien and Lewis anyway. I mean, both the Lord of the Rings and Narnia series are completely romantic. In fact, most books in the fantasy genre are romantic, and I'm not sure there's any series that's not.
I'd say, it's more of a Harry Potter meets Rule of the Bone.
zero isn't a real number
So they're saying the number is imaginary?
*ducks*
But were you dealing drugs?
There are many under reported cases of private citizens stopping criminal behavior with a firearm.
I know I'm being kind of pedantic, but I find your use of "criminal behavior" to describe shootings to be disingenuous. Shootings are more like a special class of intentional man-made disasters in that the purpose of the shooter is to cause as much devastation as possible. In this case, you can think of the perpetrator as a stereotypical villian, while the person stopping the villian as the antithetical hero. It's not criminal behavior (though shooting people is a crime, when done by a mentally unstable person, isn't necessarily), just destructive.
Criminal behavior, on the other hand, is more like robbery, rape, arson, or even drug dealing, and are far more common. I'm not sure there are too many cases where a gun in such events would be beneficial to the victim. In fact, it usually has the opposite effect, where the aggressor gets an additional advantage after taking the gun.
And stopping or preventing organized crime with a gun amounts to vigilanteism, which is also frowned upon.