When you say that software can "misbehave" you are really just confusing yourself even further. Misbehaving implies a conscious decision not to follow a predetermine course of action. The software does not possess consciousness and is incapable of making such decisions. The result may very well be unexpected and interesting, but only because you failed to predict it.
What the robot does - bouncing off the walls, leaving markers, tracking its position - are all preprogrammed behaviors to specific and limited types of external input. Your robot has no idea whether it is navigating an art museum or a warehouse. And even if it knew that it is crawling inside of an art museum, it would have no opinion about the paintings on the walls.
You definition of artificial intelligence is not the same as mine. That's the bottom line. Give me software that can not just recognize spoken language, but comprehend it. A software that can paraphrase "War and Peace" or make it into a poem. An intelligent machine that can create another intelligent machine of different design. A computer that you can talk to for days and think you are talking to a human being.
As to bumping into walls and leaving markers, so we can build a simplified mechanized imitation of a rat. Is that your definition of AI? Now, if instead of bumping into walls your robot would simply stop - just to piss you off - that would be a monumental achievement in the field of AI.
"When a strong AI comes to the internet (not if, but when), how will we identify it?" That's a good question. If it is a machine equivalent of human intelligence, then there should be no way to tell the two apart.
Computer vision, sorting, and chess playing are all, no doubt, interesting and complex tasks. None of them, however, require intelligence. Software breaks in unpredictable ways? Only in the sense that such break downs were not predicted - not because they could not be predicted. You have to agree that the robotic car you are describing is not really exploring anything. What it is doing is probably the opposite of intelligence.
There is a significant difference of opinion on what exactly "AI" means. Someone writes a heuristic algorithm and calls his fifty pages of C code "AI", just because it is based on intelligent search patterns. But it is the programmer's intelligence built into the code - not the computer's - and there is nothing artificial about it. Others understand AI as conscious self-awareness. That is when you tell your computer to rewrite your gigantic database, and the computer outsources the project to a contractor in India and goes back to playing Doom. So I can't agree with your lecturer: I think once AI is developed, it sure as hell is not going to play chess with you.
The article is fluff: nonexistent technology is being proposed to solve imaginary problems. Unless it is a sci-fi story, the rule of thumb should be: stop reading as soon as "A.I." is mentioned, for whatever follows is invariably a result of someone's thoroughly clueless but overactive imagination. Not only we are not close to building a "thinking" machine, we have no idea in which direction to concentrate our efforts.
Computer hardware and software become increasingly more sophisticated. Sometimes a system is complex enough to momentarily appear intelligent from a layman's point of view. Any attempt at serious interaction, however, quickly clears the smoke screen. Creating AI - in the pure sense of this term, as being an artificial equivalent to our own intelligence - at the very minimum is like discovering an extraterrestrial civilization.
Can one achieve this with "if...then" statements and "for" loops? Call me crazy, but somehow I don't think so.
I think you lost track of the subject somewhere along the way. You started out talking about information overload and ended up talking about workers who play solitaire on their computers. Having too much work and being lazy are not always the same thing (unless you are looking from a manager's perspective).
I found a great alternative to ntpd: I just use my $20 Casio digital watch to set time on all my servers once in a while. Why cares about time anyway? Is it December yet?
I liked the part where some Estonian official was complaining about Russia trying to destroy the Estonian society by attacking Estonian computers. All six of them at the same time. This brazen attack came at a difficult time, when half of Estonia's 62-strong army was involved in Iraq, leaving their homeland vulnerable to a Russian invasion. As a precautionary measure, Estonians decided to temporarily shut down both of their Web sites, until they can come up with the funds needed to upgrade their Win 95 server.
True, but understanding the law is only half of the equation. The other half is understanding the alleged offense. And that's what's lacking here. In this particular case, the judge mistook cookie-cutter spam for a personal communication. Why? Because the judge had no understanding of the technology behind spam. To her it seemed that the email was personal in nature, while in reality it could not have been any more impersonal. Email addresses are collected by bots, messages are automatically generated from templates and sent out in bulk with no human interaction of any kind. Even responses are processed automatically. Only someone with absolutely no understanding of how this process works could have ever concluded that this was a personal communication.
Granted, townie judges may not be the brightest bunch. Then again, are federal judges so much more intelligent? I often wonder how do judges with no technical background decide on highly technical issues? I mean, they are lawyers for the most part and have no other experience. Do they go entirely by "expert" testimony they hear, or are judges arrogant enough to presume they actually understand what they are talking about? This was a simple case, but there are far more technically complex cases, such as patent hearings, for example. It's a battle of experts (the best Big Money can buy), so how can a judge possibly render an intelligent ruling without understanding the technical meat of the case?
I don't think that's the reason. Even for a small-scale online gambling business you will need a start-up capital and technical potential at least comparable to that of a start-up software business. No matter how small your gambling business is and even if you run the whole thing by your lonesome, you will still need a physical base of operations, network and hardware infrastructure, banking services, online presence, custom software. No, I think the reasons here are primarily of a political nature.
I think Poland is being extremely wise to concentrate its massive financial resources on developing new types of kielbasa. Who needs space exploration when you can eat fried pig fat?
We already lost in Iraq. We lost in Iraq in 2003, when after initial military success it turned out we had no plan. As to proving who was right, I think this is as good of a time as any. A stupid decision to invade was made. People behind this decision are still in power. They press on with their stupid policies and rhetoric. You just propose we pull together and clean up their shit. I don't think so.
I see it as my duty to criticize, berate, insult and generally annoy anyone who in any way supports, implements or justifies this war. The logic here is: the next time another idiot in Washington decides to go to war, he will remember all the crap the last guy had to deal with and will change his mind. Hopefully. Hey, it's a better plan than yours.
I wonder how many tourists coming to the US get to see the Guantanamo concentration camp. Do you suppose a lot of visitors to Poland get to see the secret CIA prisons where innocent people are being tortured? I don't think so (but feel free to disagree). So before we expend to much energy criticizing the Chinese or the USSR - may it rest in peace - lets look closer to home.
This is not how it works. If your bot is posting information online with as much as a hint of any illegal activity on my part, and no court has yet found me guilty, it is called libel and you are exposing yourself to a lawsuit against which you cannot defend. Criminals may not be litigious, but it will take just one lawsuit to shut down your operation.
All of the devised methods listed in the article are probably not legal. Whichever organization employs such methods will be exposing itself to lawsuits. Sounds like these "computer scientists" need to add a good attorney to their team, just to make sure it's the hackers and not them who ends up with a legal headache.
Sounds like the plaintiff does not have much in terms of hard evidence. Even if simply making files available for download constitutes an offense, it seems they cannot show that actual file were being shared. I guess the next question would be: why did the defense loose? What mistakes did they make?
So the plaintiff did not show file transfer. Could the plaintiff have done so if required? Did they have the evidence of actual files being transferred? If not, did they have the evidence that the computer in question shared real files and not just file stubs? As I understand, they never got to examine the hard drive.
It amazes me that 50 years after Sputnik's launch Americans are still trying to explain why they weren't first in space. If you have any idea of what is involved in designing, building and launching space vehicles, you already know that in this business nothing happens by accident. Not even accidents. So the elderly Russian space pioneers are being modest. It doesn't mean we have to be naive. Of course Sputnik launch was successful on the first try not because the Russians got lucky, but because they knew what they were doing.
The say the entire Politburo wearing nothing but peacock skirts had to dance for hours around Vostok 1 to build up good juju before Gagarin's flight.
So you think that Washington is being purely altruistic in supporting anti-government protesters in Burma. Well, that's one point of view. Another point of view is that, perhaps, the US is seeking a new foothold in the region for its ABM defense network or some other military installation.
Just looking at Poland, Czech Republic, and the Republic of Georgia, it seems that American radars and missiles are following closely behind American democracy. Burma's location - right between India and China - seems to be strategically significant from a military perspective. It certainly would be a prime location for an ABM site.
I am not saying the US has any specific plans for Burma. But I am saying that it's a possibility, considering how quickly this old issue of military rule in Burma took over the news and led veto talk at the UN. A group of monks unhappy with their government just can't set things like these into motion. It takes a little bit of help.
Well, they've been 'putting up with it' since the early sixties. That's when the military took control of Burma. That's almost half-a-century of the current government regime in Burma - not exactly news-worthy material.
I think we are assuming too much when we say "most people". Did you count them personally? Because I didn't. And so I don't know if it's really "most people" or a couple thousand radicals led by a few religious nuts.
What do we have in Burma: masses rising up against the oppressive regime, or local religious leaders planning a power grab? With monks leading the protests, I just don't know. Sounds like it might a little bit of both, actually.
I appreciate the education, but what I was really trying to say was: who cares? I really don't understand what this noise is all about. Suddenly, BBC and CNN became deeply concerned with the state of civil liberties in Burma. Like Burma wasn't a military dictatorship for the past forty five years.
Americans and Brits are up to their balls in trouble in Iraq and Afghanistan. But all I see in the news is Myanmar and Sudan. Seems like somebody is trying to shift public attention in the US and the UK from the quagmire in Iraq to some monks in Burma.
There is no such thing as "culture of law enforcement". There are professionals who come to work every day and do their jobs. And then there are losers who bend and break the rules to take out their insecurities on others.
You might have seen this around the office: two guys writing code and ten more people make up schedules, set deadlines, hold endless telecons and meetings, and generally make everyone's life miserable without contributing anything to the process.
Law enforcement is no that much more different: two guys are following the rules and catching crooks, and ten guys are writing tickets, stuffing their faces at a local donut shop, and talk about the "culture of law enforcement."
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When you say that software can "misbehave" you are really just confusing yourself even further. Misbehaving implies a conscious decision not to follow a predetermine course of action. The software does not possess consciousness and is incapable of making such decisions. The result may very well be unexpected and interesting, but only because you failed to predict it.
What the robot does - bouncing off the walls, leaving markers, tracking its position - are all preprogrammed behaviors to specific and limited types of external input. Your robot has no idea whether it is navigating an art museum or a warehouse. And even if it knew that it is crawling inside of an art museum, it would have no opinion about the paintings on the walls.
You definition of artificial intelligence is not the same as mine. That's the bottom line. Give me software that can not just recognize spoken language, but comprehend it. A software that can paraphrase "War and Peace" or make it into a poem. An intelligent machine that can create another intelligent machine of different design. A computer that you can talk to for days and think you are talking to a human being.
As to bumping into walls and leaving markers, so we can build a simplified mechanized imitation of a rat. Is that your definition of AI? Now, if instead of bumping into walls your robot would simply stop - just to piss you off - that would be a monumental achievement in the field of AI.
"When a strong AI comes to the internet (not if, but when), how will we identify it?" That's a good question. If it is a machine equivalent of human intelligence, then there should be no way to tell the two apart.
Computer vision, sorting, and chess playing are all, no doubt, interesting and complex tasks. None of them, however, require intelligence. Software breaks in unpredictable ways? Only in the sense that such break downs were not predicted - not because they could not be predicted. You have to agree that the robotic car you are describing is not really exploring anything. What it is doing is probably the opposite of intelligence.
There is a significant difference of opinion on what exactly "AI" means. Someone writes a heuristic algorithm and calls his fifty pages of C code "AI", just because it is based on intelligent search patterns. But it is the programmer's intelligence built into the code - not the computer's - and there is nothing artificial about it. Others understand AI as conscious self-awareness. That is when you tell your computer to rewrite your gigantic database, and the computer outsources the project to a contractor in India and goes back to playing Doom. So I can't agree with your lecturer: I think once AI is developed, it sure as hell is not going to play chess with you.
The article is fluff: nonexistent technology is being proposed to solve imaginary problems. Unless it is a sci-fi story, the rule of thumb should be: stop reading as soon as "A.I." is mentioned, for whatever follows is invariably a result of someone's thoroughly clueless but overactive imagination. Not only we are not close to building a "thinking" machine, we have no idea in which direction to concentrate our efforts.
Computer hardware and software become increasingly more sophisticated. Sometimes a system is complex enough to momentarily appear intelligent from a layman's point of view. Any attempt at serious interaction, however, quickly clears the smoke screen. Creating AI - in the pure sense of this term, as being an artificial equivalent to our own intelligence - at the very minimum is like discovering an extraterrestrial civilization.
Can one achieve this with "if...then" statements and "for" loops? Call me crazy, but somehow I don't think so.
The cost of storage medium is halving every year, but not the cost of preserving digital content. You see, the two are not the same.
I think you lost track of the subject somewhere along the way. You started out talking about information overload and ended up talking about workers who play solitaire on their computers. Having too much work and being lazy are not always the same thing (unless you are looking from a manager's perspective).
I found a great alternative to ntpd: I just use my $20 Casio digital watch to set time on all my servers once in a while. Why cares about time anyway? Is it December yet?
I liked the part where some Estonian official was complaining about Russia trying to destroy the Estonian society by attacking Estonian computers. All six of them at the same time. This brazen attack came at a difficult time, when half of Estonia's 62-strong army was involved in Iraq, leaving their homeland vulnerable to a Russian invasion. As a precautionary measure, Estonians decided to temporarily shut down both of their Web sites, until they can come up with the funds needed to upgrade their Win 95 server.
True, but understanding the law is only half of the equation. The other half is understanding the alleged offense. And that's what's lacking here. In this particular case, the judge mistook cookie-cutter spam for a personal communication. Why? Because the judge had no understanding of the technology behind spam. To her it seemed that the email was personal in nature, while in reality it could not have been any more impersonal. Email addresses are collected by bots, messages are automatically generated from templates and sent out in bulk with no human interaction of any kind. Even responses are processed automatically. Only someone with absolutely no understanding of how this process works could have ever concluded that this was a personal communication.
Granted, townie judges may not be the brightest bunch. Then again, are federal judges so much more intelligent? I often wonder how do judges with no technical background decide on highly technical issues? I mean, they are lawyers for the most part and have no other experience. Do they go entirely by "expert" testimony they hear, or are judges arrogant enough to presume they actually understand what they are talking about? This was a simple case, but there are far more technically complex cases, such as patent hearings, for example. It's a battle of experts (the best Big Money can buy), so how can a judge possibly render an intelligent ruling without understanding the technical meat of the case?
I don't think that's the reason. Even for a small-scale online gambling business you will need a start-up capital and technical potential at least comparable to that of a start-up software business. No matter how small your gambling business is and even if you run the whole thing by your lonesome, you will still need a physical base of operations, network and hardware infrastructure, banking services, online presence, custom software. No, I think the reasons here are primarily of a political nature.
I think Poland is being extremely wise to concentrate its massive financial resources on developing new types of kielbasa. Who needs space exploration when you can eat fried pig fat?
We already lost in Iraq. We lost in Iraq in 2003, when after initial military success it turned out we had no plan. As to proving who was right, I think this is as good of a time as any. A stupid decision to invade was made. People behind this decision are still in power. They press on with their stupid policies and rhetoric. You just propose we pull together and clean up their shit. I don't think so.
I see it as my duty to criticize, berate, insult and generally annoy anyone who in any way supports, implements or justifies this war. The logic here is: the next time another idiot in Washington decides to go to war, he will remember all the crap the last guy had to deal with and will change his mind. Hopefully. Hey, it's a better plan than yours.
I guess the data goes to DoD just in case they detect some really nasty weather and they need to bomb it real quick. Nothing to worry about.
I wonder how many tourists coming to the US get to see the Guantanamo concentration camp. Do you suppose a lot of visitors to Poland get to see the secret CIA prisons where innocent people are being tortured? I don't think so (but feel free to disagree). So before we expend to much energy criticizing the Chinese or the USSR - may it rest in peace - lets look closer to home.
This is not how it works. If your bot is posting information online with as much as a hint of any illegal activity on my part, and no court has yet found me guilty, it is called libel and you are exposing yourself to a lawsuit against which you cannot defend. Criminals may not be litigious, but it will take just one lawsuit to shut down your operation.
All of the devised methods listed in the article are probably not legal. Whichever organization employs such methods will be exposing itself to lawsuits. Sounds like these "computer scientists" need to add a good attorney to their team, just to make sure it's the hackers and not them who ends up with a legal headache.
Sounds like the plaintiff does not have much in terms of hard evidence. Even if simply making files available for download constitutes an offense, it seems they cannot show that actual file were being shared. I guess the next question would be: why did the defense loose? What mistakes did they make?
So the plaintiff did not show file transfer. Could the plaintiff have done so if required? Did they have the evidence of actual files being transferred? If not, did they have the evidence that the computer in question shared real files and not just file stubs? As I understand, they never got to examine the hard drive.
It amazes me that 50 years after Sputnik's launch Americans are still trying to explain why they weren't first in space. If you have any idea of what is involved in designing, building and launching space vehicles, you already know that in this business nothing happens by accident. Not even accidents. So the elderly Russian space pioneers are being modest. It doesn't mean we have to be naive. Of course Sputnik launch was successful on the first try not because the Russians got lucky, but because they knew what they were doing.
The say the entire Politburo wearing nothing but peacock skirts had to dance for hours around Vostok 1 to build up good juju before Gagarin's flight.
So you think that Washington is being purely altruistic in supporting anti-government protesters in Burma. Well, that's one point of view. Another point of view is that, perhaps, the US is seeking a new foothold in the region for its ABM defense network or some other military installation.
Just looking at Poland, Czech Republic, and the Republic of Georgia, it seems that American radars and missiles are following closely behind American democracy. Burma's location - right between India and China - seems to be strategically significant from a military perspective. It certainly would be a prime location for an ABM site.
I am not saying the US has any specific plans for Burma. But I am saying that it's a possibility, considering how quickly this old issue of military rule in Burma took over the news and led veto talk at the UN. A group of monks unhappy with their government just can't set things like these into motion. It takes a little bit of help.
Well, they've been 'putting up with it' since the early sixties. That's when the military took control of Burma. That's almost half-a-century of the current government regime in Burma - not exactly news-worthy material.
I think we are assuming too much when we say "most people". Did you count them personally? Because I didn't. And so I don't know if it's really "most people" or a couple thousand radicals led by a few religious nuts.
What do we have in Burma: masses rising up against the oppressive regime, or local religious leaders planning a power grab? With monks leading the protests, I just don't know. Sounds like it might a little bit of both, actually.
I appreciate the education, but what I was really trying to say was: who cares? I really don't understand what this noise is all about. Suddenly, BBC and CNN became deeply concerned with the state of civil liberties in Burma. Like Burma wasn't a military dictatorship for the past forty five years.
Americans and Brits are up to their balls in trouble in Iraq and Afghanistan. But all I see in the news is Myanmar and Sudan. Seems like somebody is trying to shift public attention in the US and the UK from the quagmire in Iraq to some monks in Burma.
There is no such thing as "culture of law enforcement". There are professionals who come to work every day and do their jobs. And then there are losers who bend and break the rules to take out their insecurities on others.
You might have seen this around the office: two guys writing code and ten more people make up schedules, set deadlines, hold endless telecons and meetings, and generally make everyone's life miserable without contributing anything to the process.
Law enforcement is no that much more different: two guys are following the rules and catching crooks, and ten guys are writing tickets, stuffing their faces at a local donut shop, and talk about the "culture of law enforcement."