"I think the vision systems such as those used in the Grand Challenge are comparable to those of a fly (even without the laser scanners)."
No, they are not. The primary system used to navigate that course was GPS -- there were only three notably short portions where sensors had to be used, and those were tunnels, which could have been dealt with by very simple mechanical feedback systems such as those found in some toys. I'm not saying they _were_ using such systems, merely that they could have used them, so the DARPA challenge did not require a functioning visual system of any sort to complete it.
I don't know much of the details of the race systems but I don't think they had enough time to map out the coordinates of the course with sufficient detail to navigate with GPS only. Also I've been under the impression that even GPS with WAAS is only accurate to within about 10 feet. They could have used local differential GPS I suppose. Also, sometimes the cars had to pass, and GPS would have been no use for that. Carnegie Mellon has been using vision in their vehicles for a long time. Also check this quote from a Wired article about Stanley.
"The lasers were good at sensing ground within 30 meters of the car, but beyond that the data quality deteriorated. The video camera was good at looking farther away but was less accurate in the foreground. Maybe, Thrun thought, the laser's findings could inform how the computer interpreted the faraway video. If the laser identified drivable road, it could ask the video to search for similar patterns ahead. In other words, the computer could teach itself.
It worked. Stanley's vision extended far down the road now, allowing it to steer confidently at speeds of up to 45 miles per hour on dirt roads in the desert. "
"I doubt anybody has put much effort into fully replicating a fly's vision capabilities"
Then maybe they should...
They don't want to because insect behavior is not valuable enough to expend the resources that are better spent developing other capabilities. Especially since we can't replicate their mechanical abilities.
It is doubtful that individual insects have anything resembling intelligence, because their capacity to learn is extremely limited, and appears to be non-existent in many species.
Extremely limited is more than nothing. I think we should say they have intelligence, just very little of it.
"They're just expendable, and we don't care much when they do something stupid that gets them killed, or fail to achieve their goals."
All forms of life are equally expendable...
Some insects hatch thousands of eggs, only two of which must survive on average to maintain the species. Generally a robot with that kind of failure rate would be worthless.
"Surely our simulated neural networks qualify as at least a beginning of modeling brain functionality"
They do indeed, just as logic gates are the beginning of computer functionality. There is however a big difference between emulating some of the hardware, and knowing how the original hardware is configured and programmed. This is one of the areas that's turning out to be far more difficult than people used to think would be the case.
I don't think the credibility of AI researchers is completely destroyed by what they thought all the way back in the 60s. What about 20 years ago when the computational power of the human brain was a little better understood. Were there some forecasters that predicted AI wouldn't fully succeed until computational power reached something like 10^18 ops? Maybe it's not much more difficult than they thought.
>[Speech Recognition] tech will eventually be as good as on star trek as long as people work on it.
I think there are many areas of Artificial Intelligence, such as speech recognition, that will require full human level intelligence and knowledge in order to perform at an acceptable level. If you think about it, even humans don't recognize speech all that well. How often do people have to ask others to repeat themselves? Imagine how poorly a human would take dictation, if the human had as much as only one tenth of normal brain power. Furthermore many tasks require a general knowledge of the world to resolve ambiguities. The same applies to other areas. A robot that drives as poorly as the typical human driver, will never be allowed to control a car in public.
However I expect human level computer intelligence in only 20 or 30 years. But then the explosion of intelligence will render voice recognition irrelevant.
I expect most of a fruit fly's capabilities could be replicated, but few think the investment would be worth it
I doubt we could replicate the way their visual systems work, because there is no artificial vision system that allows an autonomous machine to move around in three dimensions as well as a fruit fly.
Actually I think the vision systems such as those used in the Grand Challenge are comparable to those of a fly (even without the laser scanners). I doubt anybody has put much effort into fully replicating a fly's vision capabilities. So I'd say we do have insect level capabilities in the areas where enough resources have been applied.
The AI in games gets limited development resources
Everything has limited development resources.
By limited I mean that I wouldn't be surprised if the AI of some games was created by a single developer. Even a small team of developers doesn't represent very many resources. Also, the failure of a few AI game characters doesn't necessarily represent the state of the art in AI, it may just be that the developers made a stupid mistake or focused their effort elsewhere. AI game characters also have very limited computing resources. The AI can't make the graphics lag.
After the DARPA Grand Challenge I'm surprised at how well they've done with the limited computational power available (though I think they may have made it a little easier [in the second race])
I don't think they've done very well at all. Insects routinely handle much more complex challenges as part of their daily lives,
Do they really? I can't think of any insect behavior that seems very sophisticated at all. Driving down the Grand Challenge road seems almost as challenging as anything I've seen insects do. Of course things that seem simple are often much more complicated than they look.
...and insects have remarkably little in the way of raw processing power. There is obviously a fairly simple and extremely robust solution to this sort of problem that nature found many hundreds of millions of years ago...
I don't think insects have very robust intelligence at all. They're just expendable, and we don't care much when they do something stupid that gets them killed, or fail to achieve their goals.
If we manage to make them truly logical, that alone may make them difficult for many people to understand:)
I don't think that logic will be the barrier, but rather the fact that the first "intelligent" systems will be designed to solve a specific narrow set of problems, and will therefore "think" in terms that fit the problem domain. IMO general purpose intelligence of the sort we have will take a quite a long time to appear because we do not understand enough about the way our own brains work to even begin the task of modeling their functionality, even if we did have enough computing power to do so.
Surely our simulated neural networks qualify as at least a beginning of modeling brain functionality. Mathematical computation functionality and memory has already far exceeded human capacity. We have numerous algorithms for pattern recognition, signal processing, voice recognition, logic, and much more. I think these constitute even more than just a beginning.
I tend to think that the software of strong AI will be relatively easy (not easy, just relatively easy compared to the hardware). I expect strong AI within just a few years of the availability of suitable hardware. I wouldn't even be surprised if we already have nearly all the ideas we need to create intelligence, but just lack hardware of sufficient power to integrate it all together and work out all the bugs. I can't rule out the possibility that some wishful thinking could be creeping in here, but a lot
Agreed in full. However, I doubt that such a breakthrough will come from the AI research community, who have consistently failed to match the advances made in virtually all other fields of computing.
It seems to me that where it has been possible for AI research to advance, it has done so reasonably well. The problem is that many of the problems to be solved require massive computational power. Even humans can't understand the speech of other humans with very high reliability. What can we expect from AI researchers using a computer with 1/100th the power of a brain (or much much less). Many of the tasks we want computers to perform can't be carried out with acceptable reliability even by a human of low IQ. If a robot drives a car as bad as a human, it won't be allowed on the road. I foresee little progress in AI until computational power matches or surpasses the human brain. It's very difficult to develop and test systems without the hardware to run on.
It is I think more likely that intelligent machines will emerge from some other research area, possibly as a side-effect of technology that is at best only tangentially related to our current concepts of computing. Research into cognition and behavior indicates that animals (including humans) process their environment using non-deterministic predictive mechanisms that require a minimal set of "cues" to act as prediction branch keys (and can therefore be "tricked" by things like optical illusions, sleight of hand, and camouflage).
Interesting theory.
Trying to emulate such mechanisms using deterministic reactive processes is thus a blind alley that will demand ever more computing power to approximate what nature has achieved using small portions of fairly simple creatures such as fruit flies, with materials that carry and process signals at a tiny fraction of the speed that today's computers are capable of, and that have minimal energy requirements.
I think you're a little hard on the AI researchers. I expect most of a fruit fly's capabilities could be replicated, but few think the investment would be worth it. The problems we put most effort into are very hard. The AI in games gets limited development resources. After the DARPA Grand Challenge I'm surprised at how well they've done with the limited computational power available (though I think they may have made it a little easier this year).
I also doubt that the first truly intelligent machines will be "human emulators" that can pass the Turning test -- indeed, I think it is likely that their very nature will mean that their "thought processes" are quite alien to us, although we will obviously require some method of interacting with them, just as we (for example) have ways of interacting with working dogs, who also "think" in ways that are quite distinct from our own.
Probably true. If we manage to make them truly logical, that alone may make them difficult for many people to understand:)
This will of course be used by some to "prove" that such machines are not intelligent at all, because a lot of goal-post moving has gone into arguing that anything a machine can do is simply a mechanical process that requires no intelligence whatsoever. If you'd asked someone from the 19th century whether something that can play chess at international Grand Master level, solve complex mathematical formulae, and compose music and poetry (admittedly badly, but then the same can be said of nearly all humans!) was intelligent, they would have undoubtedly replied in the affirmative, but each of these tasks has been progressively removed from the ever-shortening list of "intelligent stuff" whenever someone demonstrates a machine that can do them.
So when (and I do believe it is a when rather than an if) machine intelligence does appear, the "it's not really intelligent" crowd will be left with an ever-shrinking Adamsian list of things that "prov
I wasn't claiming that we should just take the word of AI promoters and conclude that the singularity is probably near. I was only saying that one shouldn't be OVER confident that it isn't near, or isn't possible. The GGP made assurances that can't reasonably be made.
I just noticed your reply. Is there any point in me replying 11 days later? Is anyone listening? I'll post this just to see if I can reply this long later.
Simply untrue and also misleading. Computers can also gather information from the environment and interact with the environment. What's more their instructions need not come from humans. Their instructions can be randomly generated, they can be generated by intelligent algoritms, artificial life simulations, or by trial and error of a robot interacting in the real world. Computers are already capable of doing many things that humans can't do and even some things that humans can't even program computers to do.
>no one is smart enough to make a set of instructions that will allow for a computer to have an independent "thought"
Computers already independently figure things out that humans can't. You could say the computers don't do it independently, but then little of what humans do is independent of what they leared from entities other than themselves.
You have no reasonable basis to say that we can't make a set of instructions that will allow a computer to be intelligent, because you don't know what the algoritms of intelligence are. They may be much simpler than you think.
There is no "artificial intelligence". All intelligence that is called artificial intelligence is genuine.
There is no artificial intelligence, because what is called "artificial intelligence" is actually just algorithms. The only intelligence involved is in the designing of them by humans. These "futurists" (science fiction writers) have been saying, "strong AI is right around the corner" for at least four decades now. As someone who designs neural networks and keeps up the latest research, I can assure you that we are no closer to "strong AI" than we were in the stone age. An artificial neural network is no more likely to aquire intelligence than a clay head with magic words spoken to it. I'm not knocking either idea...just putting it perspective.
Do chimpanzees or gorillas have any intelligence at all, even just a little bit? If they do, then what about dogs, rats, ants, etc. Do ants have any intelligence at all, even just a teensy tiny minuscule amount? Roughly where would you draw the line between absolutely no intelligence at all, and gorillas? If you think even gorillas have no intelligence, then roughly where between brain-dead and Einstein, is the dividing line between an intelligent human, and a human with not the slightest amount of intelligence? Is intelligence an all or nothing thing?
If a machine and its algorithms were designed by a human, why does that mean it isn't intelligent, but it is only algorithms? Is it intelligent only if it was designed by random mutation and natural selection, or by god?
You are very assured that we are not close to strong AI. Do you really think you are well justified in such a high level of confidence, when there are probably people who are more intelligent and more well informed about AI than you or I, and who also think we are close to strong AI? We who think the singularity is near could very well be wrong. Would you admit that you could be wrong? Would you admit more than just a minuscule possibility that you could be wrong? I'm curious about the thinking of someone who studies AI and still thinks the singularity is far.
>Can you imagine the "text book that anyone can edit" being used in any school, college, hospital, or anywhere else where accurate information is important?
There seems to be a trend in education now for teachers to have the students discuss things amongst themselves and thereby teach each other. Wikipedia is certainly not nearly as unreliable as the other students in the class. Sure wikipedia is unreliable but it's also very useful. Should we also stop listening to what other people say? It's my experience that what people tell me is much less reliable than even wikipedia. Just because a source is unreliable doesn't mean it's not highly valuable. Don't bother reading slashdot posts either because some of the posts here are a little unreliable.
>How many several-hundred-year-old organizations can one find right now?
Few organizations are carefully designed and planned especially to last a long time. Besides, nanotech probably won't take more than a hundred years or so to develop, and probably a lot less. I don't understand why people have such a hard time believing that we will soon posses the technology to scan and reconstruct or replicate the molecules of the brain.
As for legal issues and such, there's no need to speculate. People have already been preserved for decades. I haven't heard of many problems.
World war and such still remains a major concern. I think the facilities are typically placed in relatively safe locations so there is a decent chance of their survival. There are no guaranties, but not dying is a pretty big payoff. Of course you will have a little more money to spend while you are alive if you don't invest in one of the life insurance policies that are used to fund the preservation, so there is something to loose. But you can get yourself preserved for an amazingly small amount like $30/month (paid to an insurance policy while you're alive).
Another consideration is that if you're not too old today, then you stand a good chance of seeing the singularity (the explosion of artificial intelligence) or nanotechnology that will halt aging, before the end of your natural life span. Consider a child of today. It's kind of shocking when you realize that a child today can expect to easily live another 80 years, and by that time super intelligence will very likely have arrived, and death from old age will no longer be an issue. Children of today can figure they probably won't ever die of old age! The old saying that everybody dies someday, can no longer be justified! But people are still saying it. They haven't got it yet. Can you imagine what technology will be like in 80 years? Sure, huge advances might not happen, but I can't see much reason to think they won't.
>IMO, search engines, such as Google, return better results now than Yahoo!, Lycos, or Altavista returned in 1996.
Which part of 1996? I don't remember which years but if my memory serves me, search quality degraded very rapidly when searching became popular. At one point, before I found out about Google, I had basically given up on search engines because they barely returned anything but garbage. Google was revolutionary, but it's nothing compared to what it would be if they didn't have to fight spammers. It's actually funny to think that there was a time when the "keywords" meta tag in web pages was actually given serious weight by search engines. For a search engine to put major trust in the keywords meta tag today would be about like trusting nobody would steal a pile of cash laying on the sidewalk. If you think Google gives good results today, imagine if nobody tried to fake out the search engines. The results would be massively better.
>can you name one democracy successfully established due completely to external impetus?
Completely? No, but it doesn't have to be completely external.
>Japan and Germany don't count, since both were democracies
Nice try at dismissing the definitive counter example of your position. Why does them having been democracies make them not count? Was Japan a real democracy at any point before WWII? I think I heard that Iraq was a democracy at some point in the past(maybe not a real one) Even if Iraq was never a democracy, why be sure it can't become one? It took two tries to straighten Germany out. We did Japan in one. Maybe we can do Iraq in one.
>I am of the opinion, considering the quality of 'liberty' the Iraqis are now experiencing, that we chose the wrong evil this time.
It's not about what they're now experiencing, it's about what the country and region will be like when the situation has stabilized. Invading Iraq has made the world much more dangerous now than it was before we invaded Iraq. We knew it would (though we optimistically hoped it would have stabilized a little faster). The hope was that in the long term it would make the world better. We'll see how it turns out.
>My point is that the US is willing to accept a lack of democracy to the end of greater world stability.
Sometimes the US isn't willing to make the sacrifice necessary to liberate some oppressed peoples. Our selfish cowardice in Somalia is a particularly shameful example. Sometimes we can't liberate the oppressed, like in China or the USSR. Sometimes, especially in the past, the US has done some nasty things. But two wrongs don't make a right. Invading Iraq was the right thing to do. Just because we've done some other things wrong doesn't mean we should've done the wrong thing in Iraq by staying out.
I just like to point out that we shouldn't let them run their countries the way they want. We shouldn't stay out of their business. We shouldn't refrain from invading their country. Remember to keep straight who "them" and "their" is referring to, i.e. the dictators or the people. Invading and liberating a country is no more wrong than invading a bank to liberate the hostages from the robbers.
Whose country did the US invade recently? Are you referring Sadam Hussein's country? Or are you referring to the Iraqi peoples' country? Because I don't think the people of Iraq objected to us liberating their country (most didn't, some did). Now Sadam probably objected to us invading his country, but then it wasn't really his country. When you put that s and apostrophe after peoples' please remember who is supposed to possess the country. It's the peoples' country, not the government's country. If it's not a real democracy then the country has been robbed from the people and stolen by the government. The country isn't being run the way they (the people) want it. It's absurd to respect the wishes of the government(the robbers) if it's not a real democracy. Saying we shouldn't invade countries ruled by dictators is like saying we shouldn't send in the swat team to liberate the hostages in a bank robbery, because we should just let them run their bank the way they want to, and stay out of their business.
I'm sorry if I confused anyone. I should have said "similar kind of manipulation". Wikipedia has a lot of effective defense mechanisms, but I think it will be degraded considerably if it ever becomes as big a target as google. In the early days of the web, search engines returned wonderfully useful results because they hadn't been wrecked by search engine optimization. Those days didn't last long. Wikipedia may be able to fight off total destruction, but I'll be amazed if it isn't severely degraded. Then again I'm amazed its done as well as it has.
>Bad guys crawl back into dark hole
You're very optimistic, but even if Wikipedia is smarter than banks are, that doesn't mean it'll beat the bad guys. The search engines have been and may always be severely degraded by the bad guys.
>No, Wikipedia will not degenerate into a spam slum overnight, or anytime soon.
I doubt you have any solid justification for your apparently high level of confidence, but lets hope you're right.
Anyone who thinks Wikipedia is reliable is crazy. Whether it's more or less reliable than traditional sources is irrelevant. Wikipedia is a revolutionary and extremely valuable means of information distribution. It's complementary to other sources. I don't think it's misleading, because they're very up front about where the information comes from (i.e. anybody). I fear that if it gets as popular as say google, that it may be destroyed by the same kind of manipulation that ravages the search engines.
I hate to rain on their parade, but I don't consider a flight in ground effect to be a real flight, otherwise you could say hovercraft are flying too. When an aircraft is within about one wingspan of the ground, it can fly much more efficiently. An aircraft that can fly in ground effect can't necessarily fly up to usefull altitudes.
The use of jets to give it a boost up to takoff speed is also highly questionable. Even if they cut the jets before liftoff, it may be sort of like a slingshot launch, which isn't really sustained flight either.
It's still cool anyway, and it looks like they're pretty close.
imagine the ISS gets hit by space junk and 3 people can go back to earth while the other have to wave goodbye on the ISS and die?
I think everyone who goes up in the shuttle these days wears a pressure suit. They could wear it while at the station, and if the station depressurizes they should have plenty of time to fix it or close off the damaged section.
>And how exactly do you ensure that the booting is happening outside the VM?
A full reset, typically by powering down. Of course that's a problem for servers. Perhaps BIOS manufacturers could create a BIOS that had firmware to take control of the system when you push a button and then run the virus scanner from your read-only media.
Why the OS makers? Third-party boot CDs have been easy to build or download and should be part of every skilled users toolkit. Very full-featured BartPE, "khauyeung", Linux, BSD, etc live CDs are easy to find and customize if needed.
I think it would work a lot more reliably and be much easier for users, if it was integrated into the system. It should become a part of routine maintenance even for regular users.
This study must not be very realistic if they had 3 rear enders out of 40 drivers. If it was anything like that bad in real life, there would be so many bodies on the road there would be no need for an experiment like this. Not that I think driving while talking is a good idea.
Apple consistently ranks at or near the top for free tech support; Dell at or near rock-bottom.
The link you provided doesn't seem to be consistent with your characterization of Dell at or near rock-bottom. For example in the desktop PC category it lists "...eMachines at 62,...Dell at 54,... and Compaq cruising in with a 46." Apple is listed at 82. That's low for Dell, but still beats out or matches a couple other major companies, and is middle of the pack for Windows desktops, from what's shown at the link.
The site seems to contradict itself when it says "Lenovo managed to tie Apple in each case in the laptop survey" but then says "...Apple also scored an 82, with Lenovo at 69..." Or maybe the numbers are just different than the survey.
I wonder if Apples numbers could be skewed because Apple owners are sort of a special group(no insult or compliment intended by special). There is probably much less brand loyalty among the owners of Windows machines. I also wonder what the price difference is between comparable Apple and Windows machines (if any), and what kind of support and quality that could buy if a Windows vendor would/could/does sell it.
Maybe the lesson to take from the report is that if you're going to buy a Windows box, that you shouldn't buy it from any of the companies listed, because Apple proves that they could do much better.
I wonder if you would get better support if you told them you were a consumer reports member and you always fill out their surveys.
I don't think this changes the situation much. Viruses have always tried to hide. This just requires different methods to detect them. Ultimately some viruses can only be reliably detected by booting off of readonly media. The same now as before. I think OS providers should provide a boot disk for routine scanning as a matter of standard procedure.
If you know much about installing linux, then you should show up at the local linux user group meeting when they start shutting peoples computers off, so we won't get overwhelmed by the crowds. They may be kind of small crowds, but it should be a nice little boost for free software.
>China has tens of thousands of opposition protests every year.
If there's real open opposition then what is the point of the great firewall? Is this sort of like the post above where someone said that nobody actually got run over by tanks in Tienanmen Square, as if getting shot was any better? The government may actually be transitioning to freedom. That wouldn't mean the former lack of freedom was any less of a crime. Also, what are they protesting about? Only what they're allowed to? Are they allowed to have a protest calling for an opposition party candidate on the ballot?
>China has tens of thousands of opposition protests every year. How many are there in the US?
Plenty. I would estimate in the thousands. In the hundreds at least. We don't need quite as many protests because our media is free, and our government is approximately what the people want (given that nobody actually gets exactly the government they want).
>You obviously don't have the facts. Spend some time there and talk to some actual Chinese citizens before spouting off.
>...they could use more freedom.
Admittedly I don't know much about China. You don't always have to know a lot about a situation to know if it's wrong. My arguments are based on the principle that a government that doesn't allow free speech is a criminal organization. You admit that they don't have the freedom they ought to. Is what happened at Kent State anything close to what's happening in China? Is it arrogance to state that a country must have elections? So what are the facts? Are they victims of an ongoing crime or not?
Even if the majority in China deserved their fate, many are good people who risk their lives to effect change, and don't deserve the oppression they get. Furthermore, the Chinese people haven't had the education or access to information they need to appreciate the importance of freedom. That's not entirely their fault. They're victims. Just because they don't know they should rise up, or they're to scared to rise up, doesn't mean we shouldn't help them. Freedom seems obvious when you've been taught it all your life. It may not be so obvious to you if you hadn't been taught it.
Even if the majority in the USA deserved their fate, many are good people who risk their lives to effect change, and don't deserve the oppression they get. Furthermore, the American people haven't had the education or access to information they need to appreciate the importance of communism/socialism/totalitarianism. That's not entirely their fault. They're victims. Just because they don't know they should rise up, or they're to scared to rise up, doesn't mean we shouldn't help them. Communism/socialism/totalitarianism seems obvious when you've been taught it all your life. It may not be so obvious to you if you hadn't been taught it.
The difference is that Americans are free to access as much information as they want about communism/socialism/totalitarianism. The Chinese don't get to debate how they want their government run. You're engaging in the very activity they're not allowed to.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know much of the details of the race systems but I don't think they had enough time to map out the coordinates of the course with sufficient detail to navigate with GPS only. Also I've been under the impression that even GPS with WAAS is only accurate to within about 10 feet. They could have used local differential GPS I suppose. Also, sometimes the cars had to pass, and GPS would have been no use for that. Carnegie Mellon has been using vision in their vehicles for a long time. Also check this quote from a Wired article about Stanley.
"The lasers were good at sensing ground within 30 meters of the car, but beyond that the data quality deteriorated. The video camera was good at looking farther away but was less accurate in the foreground. Maybe, Thrun thought, the laser's findings could inform how the computer interpreted the faraway video. If the laser identified drivable road, it could ask the video to search for similar patterns ahead. In other words, the computer could teach itself.
It worked. Stanley's vision extended far down the road now, allowing it to steer confidently at speeds of up to 45 miles per hour on dirt roads in the desert. "
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/stanley_p r.html
They don't want to because insect behavior is not valuable enough to expend the resources that are better spent developing other capabilities. Especially since we can't replicate their mechanical abilities.
Extremely limited is more than nothing. I think we should say they have intelligence, just very little of it.
Some insects hatch thousands of eggs, only two of which must survive on average to maintain the species. Generally a robot with that kind of failure rate would be worthless.
I don't think the credibility of AI researchers is completely destroyed by what they thought all the way back in the 60s. What about 20 years ago when the computational power of the human brain was a little better understood. Were there some forecasters that predicted AI wouldn't fully succeed until computational power reached something like 10^18 ops? Maybe it's not much more difficult than they thought.
I think there are many areas of Artificial Intelligence, such as speech recognition, that will require full human level intelligence and knowledge in order to perform at an acceptable level. If you think about it, even humans don't recognize speech all that well. How often do people have to ask others to repeat themselves? Imagine how poorly a human would take dictation, if the human had as much as only one tenth of normal brain power. Furthermore many tasks require a general knowledge of the world to resolve ambiguities. The same applies to other areas. A robot that drives as poorly as the typical human driver, will never be allowed to control a car in public.
However I expect human level computer intelligence in only 20 or 30 years. But then the explosion of intelligence will render voice recognition irrelevant.
Actually I think the vision systems such as those used in the Grand Challenge are comparable to those of a fly (even without the laser scanners). I doubt anybody has put much effort into fully replicating a fly's vision capabilities. So I'd say we do have insect level capabilities in the areas where enough resources have been applied.
By limited I mean that I wouldn't be surprised if the AI of some games was created by a single developer. Even a small team of developers doesn't represent very many resources. Also, the failure of a few AI game characters doesn't necessarily represent the state of the art in AI, it may just be that the developers made a stupid mistake or focused their effort elsewhere. AI game characters also have very limited computing resources. The AI can't make the graphics lag.
Do they really? I can't think of any insect behavior that seems very sophisticated at all. Driving down the Grand Challenge road seems almost as challenging as anything I've seen insects do. Of course things that seem simple are often much more complicated than they look.
I don't think insects have very robust intelligence at all. They're just expendable, and we don't care much when they do something stupid that gets them killed, or fail to achieve their goals.
Surely our simulated neural networks qualify as at least a beginning of modeling brain functionality. Mathematical computation functionality and memory has already far exceeded human capacity. We have numerous algorithms for pattern recognition, signal processing, voice recognition, logic, and much more. I think these constitute even more than just a beginning.
I tend to think that the software of strong AI will be relatively easy (not easy, just relatively easy compared to the hardware). I expect strong AI within just a few years of the availability of suitable hardware. I wouldn't even be surprised if we already have nearly all the ideas we need to create intelligence, but just lack hardware of sufficient power to integrate it all together and work out all the bugs. I can't rule out the possibility that some wishful thinking could be creeping in here, but a lot
It seems to me that where it has been possible for AI research to advance, it has done so reasonably well. The problem is that many of the problems to be solved require massive computational power. Even humans can't understand the speech of other humans with very high reliability. What can we expect from AI researchers using a computer with 1/100th the power of a brain (or much much less). Many of the tasks we want computers to perform can't be carried out with acceptable reliability even by a human of low IQ. If a robot drives a car as bad as a human, it won't be allowed on the road. I foresee little progress in AI until computational power matches or surpasses the human brain. It's very difficult to develop and test systems without the hardware to run on.
Interesting theory.
I think you're a little hard on the AI researchers. I expect most of a fruit fly's capabilities could be replicated, but few think the investment would be worth it. The problems we put most effort into are very hard. The AI in games gets limited development resources. After the DARPA Grand Challenge I'm surprised at how well they've done with the limited computational power available (though I think they may have made it a little easier this year).
Probably true. If we manage to make them truly logical, that alone may make them difficult for many people to understand :)
I wasn't claiming that we should just take the word of AI promoters and conclude that the singularity is probably near. I was only saying that one shouldn't be OVER confident that it isn't near, or isn't possible. The GGP made assurances that can't reasonably be made.
I just noticed your reply. Is there any point in me replying 11 days later? Is anyone listening? I'll post this just to see if I can reply this long later.
Simply untrue and also misleading. Computers can also gather information from the environment and interact with the environment. What's more their instructions need not come from humans. Their instructions can be randomly generated, they can be generated by intelligent algoritms, artificial life simulations, or by trial and error of a robot interacting in the real world. Computers are already capable of doing many things that humans can't do and even some things that humans can't even program computers to do.
>no one is smart enough to make a set of instructions that will allow for a computer to have an independent "thought"
Computers already independently figure things out that humans can't. You could say the computers don't do it independently, but then little of what humans do is independent of what they leared from entities other than themselves.
You have no reasonable basis to say that we can't make a set of instructions that will allow a computer to be intelligent, because you don't know what the algoritms of intelligence are. They may be much simpler than you think.
If a machine and its algorithms were designed by a human, why does that mean it isn't intelligent, but it is only algorithms? Is it intelligent only if it was designed by random mutation and natural selection, or by god?
You are very assured that we are not close to strong AI. Do you really think you are well justified in such a high level of confidence, when there are probably people who are more intelligent and more well informed about AI than you or I, and who also think we are close to strong AI? We who think the singularity is near could very well be wrong. Would you admit that you could be wrong? Would you admit more than just a minuscule possibility that you could be wrong? I'm curious about the thinking of someone who studies AI and still thinks the singularity is far.
There seems to be a trend in education now for teachers to have the students discuss things amongst themselves and thereby teach each other. Wikipedia is certainly not nearly as unreliable as the other students in the class. Sure wikipedia is unreliable but it's also very useful. Should we also stop listening to what other people say? It's my experience that what people tell me is much less reliable than even wikipedia. Just because a source is unreliable doesn't mean it's not highly valuable. Don't bother reading slashdot posts either because some of the posts here are a little unreliable.
Few organizations are carefully designed and planned especially to last a long time. Besides, nanotech probably won't take more than a hundred years or so to develop, and probably a lot less. I don't understand why people have such a hard time believing that we will soon posses the technology to scan and reconstruct or replicate the molecules of the brain.
As for legal issues and such, there's no need to speculate. People have already been preserved for decades. I haven't heard of many problems.
World war and such still remains a major concern. I think the facilities are typically placed in relatively safe locations so there is a decent chance of their survival. There are no guaranties, but not dying is a pretty big payoff. Of course you will have a little more money to spend while you are alive if you don't invest in one of the life insurance policies that are used to fund the preservation, so there is something to loose. But you can get yourself preserved for an amazingly small amount like $30/month (paid to an insurance policy while you're alive).
Another consideration is that if you're not too old today, then you stand a good chance of seeing the singularity (the explosion of artificial intelligence) or nanotechnology that will halt aging, before the end of your natural life span. Consider a child of today. It's kind of shocking when you realize that a child today can expect to easily live another 80 years, and by that time super intelligence will very likely have arrived, and death from old age will no longer be an issue. Children of today can figure they probably won't ever die of old age! The old saying that everybody dies someday, can no longer be justified! But people are still saying it. They haven't got it yet. Can you imagine what technology will be like in 80 years? Sure, huge advances might not happen, but I can't see much reason to think they won't.
Which part of 1996? I don't remember which years but if my memory serves me, search quality degraded very rapidly when searching became popular. At one point, before I found out about Google, I had basically given up on search engines because they barely returned anything but garbage. Google was revolutionary, but it's nothing compared to what it would be if they didn't have to fight spammers. It's actually funny to think that there was a time when the "keywords" meta tag in web pages was actually given serious weight by search engines. For a search engine to put major trust in the keywords meta tag today would be about like trusting nobody would steal a pile of cash laying on the sidewalk. If you think Google gives good results today, imagine if nobody tried to fake out the search engines. The results would be massively better.
Completely? No, but it doesn't have to be completely external.
>Japan and Germany don't count, since both were democracies
Nice try at dismissing the definitive counter example of your position. Why does them having been democracies make them not count? Was Japan a real democracy at any point before WWII? I think I heard that Iraq was a democracy at some point in the past(maybe not a real one) Even if Iraq was never a democracy, why be sure it can't become one? It took two tries to straighten Germany out. We did Japan in one. Maybe we can do Iraq in one.
>I am of the opinion, considering the quality of 'liberty' the Iraqis are now experiencing, that we chose the wrong evil this time.
It's not about what they're now experiencing, it's about what the country and region will be like when the situation has stabilized. Invading Iraq has made the world much more dangerous now than it was before we invaded Iraq. We knew it would (though we optimistically hoped it would have stabilized a little faster). The hope was that in the long term it would make the world better. We'll see how it turns out.
>My point is that the US is willing to accept a lack of democracy to the end of greater world stability.
Sometimes the US isn't willing to make the sacrifice necessary to liberate some oppressed peoples. Our selfish cowardice in Somalia is a particularly shameful example. Sometimes we can't liberate the oppressed, like in China or the USSR. Sometimes, especially in the past, the US has done some nasty things. But two wrongs don't make a right. Invading Iraq was the right thing to do. Just because we've done some other things wrong doesn't mean we should've done the wrong thing in Iraq by staying out.
I just like to point out that we shouldn't let them run their countries the way they want. We shouldn't stay out of their business. We shouldn't refrain from invading their country. Remember to keep straight who "them" and "their" is referring to, i.e. the dictators or the people. Invading and liberating a country is no more wrong than invading a bank to liberate the hostages from the robbers.
Whose country did the US invade recently? Are you referring Sadam Hussein's country? Or are you referring to the Iraqi peoples' country? Because I don't think the people of Iraq objected to us liberating their country (most didn't, some did). Now Sadam probably objected to us invading his country, but then it wasn't really his country. When you put that s and apostrophe after peoples' please remember who is supposed to possess the country. It's the peoples' country, not the government's country. If it's not a real democracy then the country has been robbed from the people and stolen by the government. The country isn't being run the way they (the people) want it. It's absurd to respect the wishes of the government(the robbers) if it's not a real democracy. Saying we shouldn't invade countries ruled by dictators is like saying we shouldn't send in the swat team to liberate the hostages in a bank robbery, because we should just let them run their bank the way they want to, and stay out of their business.
>Bad guys crawl back into dark hole
You're very optimistic, but even if Wikipedia is smarter than banks are, that doesn't mean it'll beat the bad guys. The search engines have been and may always be severely degraded by the bad guys.
>No, Wikipedia will not degenerate into a spam slum overnight, or anytime soon.
I doubt you have any solid justification for your apparently high level of confidence, but lets hope you're right.
Anyone who thinks Wikipedia is reliable is crazy. Whether it's more or less reliable than traditional sources is irrelevant. Wikipedia is a revolutionary and extremely valuable means of information distribution. It's complementary to other sources. I don't think it's misleading, because they're very up front about where the information comes from (i.e. anybody). I fear that if it gets as popular as say google, that it may be destroyed by the same kind of manipulation that ravages the search engines.
The use of jets to give it a boost up to takoff speed is also highly questionable. Even if they cut the jets before liftoff, it may be sort of like a slingshot launch, which isn't really sustained flight either.
It's still cool anyway, and it looks like they're pretty close.
A full reset, typically by powering down. Of course that's a problem for servers. Perhaps BIOS manufacturers could create a BIOS that had firmware to take control of the system when you push a button and then run the virus scanner from your read-only media.
I think it would work a lot more reliably and be much easier for users, if it was integrated into the system. It should become a part of routine maintenance even for regular users.This study must not be very realistic if they had 3 rear enders out of 40 drivers. If it was anything like that bad in real life, there would be so many bodies on the road there would be no need for an experiment like this. Not that I think driving while talking is a good idea.
The site seems to contradict itself when it says "Lenovo managed to tie Apple in each case in the laptop survey" but then says "...Apple also scored an 82, with Lenovo at 69..." Or maybe the numbers are just different than the survey.
I wonder if Apples numbers could be skewed because Apple owners are sort of a special group(no insult or compliment intended by special). There is probably much less brand loyalty among the owners of Windows machines. I also wonder what the price difference is between comparable Apple and Windows machines (if any), and what kind of support and quality that could buy if a Windows vendor would/could/does sell it.
Maybe the lesson to take from the report is that if you're going to buy a Windows box, that you shouldn't buy it from any of the companies listed, because Apple proves that they could do much better.
I wonder if you would get better support if you told them you were a consumer reports member and you always fill out their surveys.
I don't think this changes the situation much. Viruses have always tried to hide. This just requires different methods to detect them. Ultimately some viruses can only be reliably detected by booting off of readonly media. The same now as before. I think OS providers should provide a boot disk for routine scanning as a matter of standard procedure.
If you know much about installing linux, then you should show up at the local linux user group meeting when they start shutting peoples computers off, so we won't get overwhelmed by the crowds. They may be kind of small crowds, but it should be a nice little boost for free software.
Great idea! Linux distributors should register as copyright holders so they can get their cut of the media taxes!
If there's real open opposition then what is the point of the great firewall? Is this sort of like the post above where someone said that nobody actually got run over by tanks in Tienanmen Square, as if getting shot was any better? The government may actually be transitioning to freedom. That wouldn't mean the former lack of freedom was any less of a crime. Also, what are they protesting about? Only what they're allowed to? Are they allowed to have a protest calling for an opposition party candidate on the ballot?
>China has tens of thousands of opposition protests every year. How many are there in the US?
Plenty. I would estimate in the thousands. In the hundreds at least. We don't need quite as many protests because our media is free, and our government is approximately what the people want (given that nobody actually gets exactly the government they want).
>You obviously don't have the facts. Spend some time there and talk to some actual Chinese citizens before spouting off.
>...they could use more freedom.
Admittedly I don't know much about China. You don't always have to know a lot about a situation to know if it's wrong. My arguments are based on the principle that a government that doesn't allow free speech is a criminal organization. You admit that they don't have the freedom they ought to. Is what happened at Kent State anything close to what's happening in China? Is it arrogance to state that a country must have elections? So what are the facts? Are they victims of an ongoing crime or not?