The little detail missing in this argument is the millions of flying toy type drones already out there. I have a drone, weighs a few grams, fits in the palm of my hand, has a camera and costs about $40. They are intended to fly inside but can fly outside in low wind. Then what about the parts built machines? the only real way to stop them is to ban the sale of - electric motors, micro-controllers, propellers, batteries, radio links, smart phones, . . .
I'm a semi-expert on propaganda and mental manipulation.. The idea that oil was the cause for Iraq has a lot of the hallmarks of being a lie or at least a half lie. My own analysis at the time was that the real (primary) reason for the war was to sow division between the Sunnis and Shiites, and look at what has happened since. ISIS is the epitome of that division.. And yes the Iraq war was also done to make money, but mainly through defence contractors creaming money not through oil. (exactly the same way the very same contractor/s creamed money during the Vietnam war)
As for US bases they were created long before the rise of the new right in a time when people still believed in the moral of defending the world against Soviet communism... They are still very useful for projecting military power over the world. The Philippines gave up their bases and now want them back because of the perceived growing threat from China..
China is one of the few nations that has really tried to do something about population. It might have the biggest population in the world but its population density is less than half that in India.
I am on the left wing liberal socialist side but this stuff is just garbage. You need to take an anti-indoctrination course and calm yourself down... BTW the war in Iraq was not about oil, that is just a stupid crude lazy misinterpretation. We don't know the real reason for the war. I'm a scientist and in science not having a glib ready answer is a valid response, and in this case the correct one...
Yep the Philippines removing their US military bases does look like a bit of an open invitation to China to invade.. Something the people there are now worried about...
Sounds like David Mindell doesn't really understand the difference between 'Weak AI' and 'Strong AI'. If this was the basic technology of cars we were talking about here that would be like not understanding the difference between cars powered by engines and cars pulled by horses... (Weak AI = Non-self-aware / non-sentient, Strong AI = Self-Aware / sentient.)
There are different problems between weak and strong AI. Strong is expected to be vastly superior in potential capabilities and driving ability and almost certainly much better at basic safety than weak. However Strong is still at least ten years away and certifying a Strong AI for cars is at least 15 years away. Weak AI has the basic problem that it doesn't really understand the world or what people are. Weak AI also has the severe problem that as it becomes more sophisticated it reaches a point where the possibility of machines becoming spontaneously self-aware begins to rise exponentially. (At least 9 times out of 10 such a machine will immediately fail and crash - not good in a car.) True Strong AI does not encounter this risk because it is always sentient right from the beginning. The big problem with Strong AI of course is that its no longer merely a machine, and as it requires a kind of homeostasis it can be argued that it is alive or even has a 'soul'. This creates problems with 'ownership', and how machines are treated. It also creates the problem that a strong AI can potentially choose to kill malevolently.
This is the real debate at the heart of future autonomous machines. Even with todays weak AI machines vision capabilities have improved hugely and have come a long way since say the Spirit or Opportunity Mars rovers - or since Apollo or the Ford model T. Computers today are about 10,000 times faster than those used 1n Apollo, about 10 billion times faster than the mechanical calculators used at the time of the first Ford.
Of course the exacerbating point here is that the journalists may have photographed something secret, or even have stolen something containing a secret.. That could be highly valuable or damaging to the company. In no way is it comparable to stealing say food from a supermarket. It is more comparable to espionage, it might even be classified as useful in potential terrorism. In the post 9/11 world doing something like this could even potentially get someone shot.
uncqual, I think you are being too pessimistic. ".. human extinction is inevitable.. " No it definitely isn't." Now just doing extrapolations into the next 30 to 100 years its quite possible to develop Von Neumann machine technology and embryonic seed technology to the point where we can build Von Neumann Seed probes. One probe builds another and on and on, and then they set out and travel to the stars, and where they find an appropriate location they then build an artificial biosphere and seed humans. We will spread out to the stars...
Von Neumann Seed probes require about six critical technologies - - Von Neumann manufacturing loop, probably either huge or microscopic in scale.. - Strong AI self aware sentient machines.. - Space mining.. - STL rocket drive.. - DNA code to life seed technology or long term biological storage and seed technology.. - Artificial Bio-system technology..
What is inevitable is that eventually we will virtually destroy the biosphere here, and very probably that the Earth will die. The Earth is single and finite, the number of stars and planets out there is virtually infinite..
You've been watching too much Fox 'news' again I'm afraid. America and the modern world are ruled by the money God, in its eyes the only crime is being poor. In its eyes Google are saints and among the worlds most blessed.. We all worship at the Google shrine every day, and if you don't you should abandon the lesser search engines and return to the master.. Do the Right Thing!
".. You can't change the colour of your skin or whether or not you were born with nuts, drastic surgery excluded..."
Don't count on that staying true for much longer. I do work on science extrapolations and science fiction - including a few scenarios surrounding things like race and genetic engineering.
One idea is a genetic weapon or -fashion item- that targets race or specifically skin colour. You infect yourself or someone infects you with the weapon and a few months later your skin starts gradually but completely changing colour. I am using it in a story set far in the future but the technology is almost possible today and pretty definitely will be possible within about 20 to 30 years... You could imagine the chaos that could ensue. White supremacists and black supremacists could use it to attack each other.. It could be used as a punishment to strip away someone's genetic identity.. It could evolve into weird new fashions...
No a silly movie about Mars is any movie where at some point they find Martians or an ancient dead Martian civilization.
About the only realistic way that we could find aliens on Mars is the way it happens in Total Recall - where an ancient alien has left an object on Mars as a SETI marker for humanity to find. (or if we find billion year dead bacteria) While the film is just sci-fi the scenario is actually half-realistic or at least possible. Mars is a good place to leave an object because Mars is orbitally and geologically stable and not a lot happens there. The problem of course is that the probability of actually finding such an object would be/is still at least billions to 1 - unless we had some special way to detect it. A needle in a million haystacks.. The statistics that there is such an object somewhere in the solar system are about ~ 100:1 and - the most likely places to find one might be Mars or the Moon or even Pluto..
Just reading through this SD I just thought of another big potential problem with these displays. We are talking about people wearing headsets that put fully 100% of their vision a few mm from video displays potentially for hours at a time. There must be considered the quality of the light that these displays emit - it needs a good spectrum but even more importantly it needs to be non-polarised. In short over-exposure to highly polarised light is a strong contender as one of the causes of 'sickness' people often get if they persistently use ordinary LCD displays too closely and for too long. - The same effect could be a prime cause of the 'motion sickness' that still seems to be associated with using VR for extended periods of more than a few minutes.
A basic solution and researching it should be easy - do tests comparing displays using LED light, verses LCDs. (However even the light from most LEDs is still quite coherent and sometimes partly polarised.) A more complete & better experiment would be to extend the test to also include other plasma displays or even CRT types if they can be found or built. Both plasma displays and CRTs can solve partly the persistence issue using tuned phosphors. An even better further extension might be to include DLP mirror type projection displays - they avoid the polarization problem and can use incandescent lights that can produce extremely good colour temperatures, or even RGB lasers.. Even DLP’s using white LED light could be used as long as the light is produced indirectly by a white phosphor.
Another Great potential Future Solution Brought to you by - Robert Lucien & Tech ONE Research..:)
The core technology needed for a realistic manned trip to Mars is nuclear rockets. The technology absolutely needed for a manned trip out to Titan is high energy nuclear rockets.
The primary technology is nuclear rockets. To further your analogy not to use nuclear rockets is the equivalent of refusing modern jets and trying to cross the Atlantic with a 1930's biplane.
Radiation is the primary problem in space. Nuclear rockets have increased power and this reduces journey times plus allows (requires) better shielding, and so reduces total cumulative radiation exposure. Pulse nuclear propulsion theoretically does even better and allows a ship to carry heavy radiation shields, and so should have an even lower cumulative radiation exposure. Nuclear pulse propulsion. One of the few cases where being next to multiple nuclear explosions actually reduces your radiation exposure.
The accident at Fukushima has also indirectly caused some 10,000 to 50,000 deaths from coal pollution because Japan in fear switched from nuclear to burning coal. ~The blame for that of course should go directly to the Japanese anti-nuclear protestors.. (The total kill from nuclear power is 0.0 to 0.2 million - whereas the total kill form anti-nuclear protest is some 5 to 10 million, again from coal pollution.)
Yes but the real irony is that radiation is scary because its invisible - but the pollution from burning coal is also invisible. As for danger burning coal is estimated to kill 750,000 a year in China alone, and coal is statistically something like 1,000 times more dangerous than nuclear.. This creates the fascinating statistic that 5 to 10 million extra people have been indirectly killed by the anti-nuclear protest crowd - by coal pollution..
The accident at Fukushima has also indirectly caused some 10,000 to 50,000 deaths from coal pollution because Japan in fear switched from nuclear to burning coal. ~The blame for that of course should go directly to the Japanese anti-nuclear protestors.. (The total kill from nuclear power is 0.0 to 0.2 million - whereas the total kill from anti-nuclear protest is some 5 to 10 million, again from coal pollution.)
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The little detail missing in this argument is the millions of flying toy type drones already out there. I have a drone, weighs a few grams, fits in the palm of my hand, has a camera and costs about $40. They are intended to fly inside but can fly outside in low wind.
Then what about the parts built machines? the only real way to stop them is to ban the sale of - electric motors, micro-controllers, propellers, batteries, radio links, smart phones, . . .
I'm a semi-expert on propaganda and mental manipulation.. The idea that oil was the cause for Iraq has a lot of the hallmarks of being a lie or at least a half lie. My own analysis at the time was that the real (primary) reason for the war was to sow division between the Sunnis and Shiites, and look at what has happened since. ISIS is the epitome of that division.. And yes the Iraq war was also done to make money, but mainly through defence contractors creaming money not through oil. (exactly the same way the very same contractor/s creamed money during the Vietnam war)
As for US bases they were created long before the rise of the new right in a time when people still believed in the moral of defending the world against Soviet communism... They are still very useful for projecting military power over the world. The Philippines gave up their bases and now want them back because of the perceived growing threat from China..
China is one of the few nations that has really tried to do something about population. It might have the biggest population in the world but its population density is less than half that in India.
I am on the left wing liberal socialist side but this stuff is just garbage. You need to take an anti-indoctrination course and calm yourself down...
BTW the war in Iraq was not about oil, that is just a stupid crude lazy misinterpretation. We don't know the real reason for the war. I'm a scientist and in science not having a glib ready answer is a valid response, and in this case the correct one...
Yep the Philippines removing their US military bases does look like a bit of an open invitation to China to invade.. Something the people there are now worried about...
Sounds like David Mindell doesn't really understand the difference between 'Weak AI' and 'Strong AI'. If this was the basic technology of cars we were talking about here that would be like not understanding the difference between cars powered by engines and cars pulled by horses...
(Weak AI = Non-self-aware / non-sentient, Strong AI = Self-Aware / sentient.)
There are different problems between weak and strong AI. Strong is expected to be vastly superior in potential capabilities and driving ability and almost certainly much better at basic safety than weak. However Strong is still at least ten years away and certifying a Strong AI for cars is at least 15 years away.
Weak AI has the basic problem that it doesn't really understand the world or what people are. Weak AI also has the severe problem that as it becomes more sophisticated it reaches a point where the possibility of machines becoming spontaneously self-aware begins to rise exponentially. (At least 9 times out of 10 such a machine will immediately fail and crash - not good in a car.)
True Strong AI does not encounter this risk because it is always sentient right from the beginning. The big problem with Strong AI of course is that its no longer merely a machine, and as it requires a kind of homeostasis it can be argued that it is alive or even has a 'soul'. This creates problems with 'ownership', and how machines are treated. It also creates the problem that a strong AI can potentially choose to kill malevolently.
This is the real debate at the heart of future autonomous machines. Even with todays weak AI machines vision capabilities have improved hugely and have come a long way since say the Spirit or Opportunity Mars rovers - or since Apollo or the Ford model T. Computers today are about 10,000 times faster than those used 1n Apollo, about 10 billion times faster than the mechanical calculators used at the time of the first Ford.
Espionage. Steal and reveal a companies secrets, and you've caused them deliberate harm. Jail lots of jail even if you were a 'journalist'..
Espionage in this case would be taking the pictures and that would have happened before they ever reached the car..
Of course the exacerbating point here is that the journalists may have photographed something secret, or even have stolen something containing a secret.. That could be highly valuable or damaging to the company. In no way is it comparable to stealing say food from a supermarket. It is more comparable to espionage, it might even be classified as useful in potential terrorism. In the post 9/11 world doing something like this could even potentially get someone shot.
"I think perhaps they should cover up all the naughty bits with a picture of David Cameron's face rather than a fig leaf."
Now that truly is disgusting.. Unless he was being eaten by a dinosaur, now that I could come to. [snigger] :D
Do not wish to buy your virus program. Now Troll Off!!
They want to drown the world under these laws..
uncqual, I think you are being too pessimistic. ".. human extinction is inevitable .. " No it definitely isn't."
Now just doing extrapolations into the next 30 to 100 years its quite possible to develop Von Neumann machine technology and embryonic seed technology to the point where we can build Von Neumann Seed probes. One probe builds another and on and on, and then they set out and travel to the stars, and where they find an appropriate location they then build an artificial biosphere and seed humans. We will spread out to the stars...
Von Neumann Seed probes require about six critical technologies -
- Von Neumann manufacturing loop, probably either huge or microscopic in scale..
- Strong AI self aware sentient machines..
- Space mining..
- STL rocket drive..
- DNA code to life seed technology or long term biological storage and seed technology..
- Artificial Bio-system technology..
What is inevitable is that eventually we will virtually destroy the biosphere here, and very probably that the Earth will die. The Earth is single and finite, the number of stars and planets out there is virtually infinite..
If we could hunt him down skin him and gut him we could stop that... Damn police always protecting the parasites.
He's obviously also got enough sock-puppets to keep everyone who criticises him modded down..
You've been watching too much Fox 'news' again I'm afraid. America and the modern world are ruled by the money God, in its eyes the only crime is being poor. In its eyes Google are saints and among the worlds most blessed.. We all worship at the Google shrine every day, and if you don't you should abandon the lesser search engines and return to the master.. Do the Right Thing!
".. You can't change the colour of your skin or whether or not you were born with nuts, drastic surgery excluded. .."
Don't count on that staying true for much longer. I do work on science extrapolations and science fiction - including a few scenarios surrounding things like race and genetic engineering.
One idea is a genetic weapon or -fashion item- that targets race or specifically skin colour. You infect yourself or someone infects you with the weapon and a few months later your skin starts gradually but completely changing colour. I am using it in a story set far in the future but the technology is almost possible today and pretty definitely will be possible within about 20 to 30 years...
You could imagine the chaos that could ensue. White supremacists and black supremacists could use it to attack each other.. It could be used as a punishment to strip away someone's genetic identity.. It could evolve into weird new fashions...
No a silly movie about Mars is any movie where at some point they find Martians or an ancient dead Martian civilization.
About the only realistic way that we could find aliens on Mars is the way it happens in Total Recall - where an ancient alien has left an object on Mars as a SETI marker for humanity to find. (or if we find billion year dead bacteria) While the film is just sci-fi the scenario is actually half-realistic or at least possible. Mars is a good place to leave an object because Mars is orbitally and geologically stable and not a lot happens there. The problem of course is that the probability of actually finding such an object would be/is still at least billions to 1 - unless we had some special way to detect it. A needle in a million haystacks..
The statistics that there is such an object somewhere in the solar system are about ~ 100:1 and - the most likely places to find one might be Mars or the Moon or even Pluto..
Just reading through this SD I just thought of another big potential problem with these displays. We are talking about people wearing headsets that put fully 100% of their vision a few mm from video displays potentially for hours at a time. There must be considered the quality of the light that these displays emit - it needs a good spectrum but even more importantly it needs to be non-polarised. In short over-exposure to highly polarised light is a strong contender as one of the causes of 'sickness' people often get if they persistently use ordinary LCD displays too closely and for too long. - The same effect could be a prime cause of the 'motion sickness' that still seems to be associated with using VR for extended periods of more than a few minutes.
A basic solution and researching it should be easy - do tests comparing displays using LED light, verses LCDs.
(However even the light from most LEDs is still quite coherent and sometimes partly polarised.)
A more complete & better experiment would be to extend the test to also include other plasma displays or even CRT types if they can be found or built. Both plasma displays and CRTs can solve partly the persistence issue using tuned phosphors.
An even better further extension might be to include DLP mirror type projection displays - they avoid the polarization problem and can use incandescent lights that can produce extremely good colour temperatures, or even RGB lasers.. Even DLP’s using white LED light could be used as long as the light is produced indirectly by a white phosphor.
Another Great potential Future Solution Brought to you by - Robert Lucien & Tech ONE Research.. :)
The core technology needed for a realistic manned trip to Mars is nuclear rockets. The technology absolutely needed for a manned trip out to Titan is high energy nuclear rockets.
The primary technology is nuclear rockets. To further your analogy not to use nuclear rockets is the equivalent of refusing modern jets and trying to cross the Atlantic with a 1930's biplane.
Radiation is the primary problem in space.
Nuclear rockets have increased power and this reduces journey times plus allows (requires) better shielding, and so reduces total cumulative radiation exposure.
Pulse nuclear propulsion theoretically does even better and allows a ship to carry heavy radiation shields, and so should have an even lower cumulative radiation exposure.
Nuclear pulse propulsion. One of the few cases where being next to multiple nuclear explosions actually reduces your radiation exposure.
What about George W Bush, a real genius there.. ;D
The accident at Fukushima has also indirectly caused some 10,000 to 50,000 deaths from coal pollution because Japan in fear switched from nuclear to burning coal. ~The blame for that of course should go directly to the Japanese anti-nuclear protestors..
(The total kill from nuclear power is 0.0 to 0.2 million - whereas the total kill form anti-nuclear protest is some 5 to 10 million, again from coal pollution.)
Yes but the real irony is that radiation is scary because its invisible - but the pollution from burning coal is also invisible. As for danger burning coal is estimated to kill 750,000 a year in China alone, and coal is statistically something like 1,000 times more dangerous than nuclear.. This creates the fascinating statistic that 5 to 10 million extra people have been indirectly killed by the anti-nuclear protest crowd - by coal pollution..
The accident at Fukushima has also indirectly caused some 10,000 to 50,000 deaths from coal pollution because Japan in fear switched from nuclear to burning coal. ~The blame for that of course should go directly to the Japanese anti-nuclear protestors..
(The total kill from nuclear power is 0.0 to 0.2 million - whereas the total kill from anti-nuclear protest is some 5 to 10 million, again from coal pollution.)