It's like how zero gravity isn't possible on earth, but if you take. . . p>
Its funny, as I understand it zero gravity isn't really possible anywhere inside our universe. In things like parabolic dives or orbital trajectories there is no change in actual gravity, the vehicle is merely accelerating to compensate. One of the main reasons why you cant do sensible gravity engine research within about 1 to 2 Earth diameters of the planets surface.
.. . . that old television series, allo allo? Racist to the French and the Germans....
You also forgot racist to the Italians and above all the British. BTW I suspect you are not getting the humour, it is not really racist it is really making humour about old cultural stereotypes. . . If anything it is gently anti-racist . . it is the BBC after all.
That's the whole problem with peer review, its become a total gravy train and a way for the big universities of constantly diverting more funds back to themselves. Its also a box closed to outsiders. If you are talented and have a great research idea but are outside the system forget it - there's a lot mediocrity that needs funding first.
When I was at university (in the UK) looking to go on to a research degree I spent a little time with some of the postdocs and they were the most demoralised drained looking bunch of people I ever met in my life. A couple of years later - after absolutely everything had gone wrong for me I ended up homeless and spent a few months on the streets of LA - the homeless had better moral than the post docs..
There's always a shortage of talented people in almost any field, especially science or engineering.
Its almost like a degree is a certificate of incompetence -it merely means your incompetent to do the job badly. The top engineers BTW you could be looking at a million dollars a year or more, though of course its far more in some fields than others...
One of our school bus drivers used to do that - also while reading the newspaper. (this was Northumberland UK) Mind you the bus was an ancient relic and could only do about 30-40 mph. Ahhh the days before health and safety...
Imagine if some terrorist walked on board wearing nothing but women's undergarments. Talk about causing terror in anyone that sees him!
To be fair that is quite terror inducing. I have just pictured Osama wearing nothing but women's underwear waiting in a security line. Pass the mind bleach please. Everyone within sight range will be traumatised for life!
A bomb is much more humane.
Osama doing that today, now that would be truly scary:D (Mind you if the terrorist was young pretty and still alive...)
I used to feel that way about the Shuttle. It did have a lot of problems but it did also achieve a major advance of technology. The Shuttle was a first step to building truly reusable spacecraft in the future. Everything says that if Bush hadn't cancelled the Shuttle replacement it would probably be in service by now and would have been massively more capable than what we are building.
The key to the Shuttle though was the space tug - and it was basically Reagan who cancelled that. The space tug needed a nuclear rocket to achieve its full potential, and due to nuclear paranoia in the early 80's that was no longer expedient. We still need nuclear rocketry today to do most of the big things in space - like manned missions to Mars or beyond, or large scale lunar bases or asteroid mining, etc, etc.
Sorry that would only make sense if temperature was a circle. Degrees is a nomenclature - and temperature has a range of millions or... billions of degrees. - That would be a lot of circles..
No sorry you lose me on Fahrenheit, Celsius is much more logical. In physics anyway Kelvin is based on the Celsius scale with 100 degrees between freezing and boiling, with the zero point moved to absolute zero. I was taught both as a kid but have always used Celsius, can never get my head around Fahrenheit - even the conversion between them is awful.
Not like 2.5 cm = 1 inch, or 2.2 Kg = 1 lb, or 1 m = 3 feet, or 1.6 km = 1 mile which I can all remember off the top of my head...
I may be being pessimistic here but I don't believe such a system actually exits. The problem is that its phenomenally difficult to write something that can do all that you want but also be simple and easy to use. A very crude solution might be a basic database to store your lookup archive with a basic lookup code on each record, and a (manual) file store using directories to store the videos. A pain in the arse to use but at least you don't get chained into a system that's pretty much guaranteed to reach a critical mass then fall over. The problem as ever is that you are making the users the coders - and because they will mess up constantly they need a system that is heavily patrolled and administrated... An alternative is some kind of submissions system that passes all the complexity of building the system to a dedicated admin/ coding team.
Ironically I am working on a system that can do stuff exactly like this and automate it fully, but its still 10 years (at least) from being a working machine even as a prototype. (its Strong AI)
This is almost exactly the vulnerability I identified in Linux and other Unixes in about 2002. I was looking for a totally secure type of OS for running a machine that needed very high security. It was only really a guess or a hunch but the shell looked like one of the biggest weak points, another for my app was fork - the biggest weakness of all though was the shear complexity of the whole unix system. My design was abandoned because a suitable OS couldn't be found, and is now being reimagined as running raw on FPGA hardware - with a thin bespoke OS layer.
The ultimate example of this kind of holier than thou science is General Relativity. And behind general relativities mathematical hedge is a simple stupid secret - the theory fails totally at FTL speeds. General Relativity depends on a rule that defines a totally unstable FTL space and effectively rules out the existence of a large or old universe. In short behind its perfection at STL speeds general relativity is utter rubbish. The real question is why. Military conspiracy theory? (at the paranoid heart of the cold war) Stupidity? Too many drugs? (...) or simply a joke to test the intelligence of other scientists?
No-one will probably ever read this post... mutter..
I work in this field and there is something about these machines that you are missing. Firstly your human replacement robot worker is going to cost about $300,000 to build then maybe up to $40,000 to $50,000 per year in maintenance. How will humans compete with that? (Don't expect those prices to fall much with mass production either.)
In fact robots might not reduce the actual workforce that much because each will require the equivalent of roughly one permanent human worker to keep it running and that worker will need to be a highly trained engineer. People seem to have some kind of mental comparison that puts these machines as somehow equivalent to cars - in reality they are far more complicated - like say jet helicopters - or maybe spacecraft - they are actually probably more complicated than either. These machines are immensely complicated, they have thousands of moving parts, tens of thousands of tiny wires and connectors and circuits, all packed into tiny difficult fiddly spaces. Even the software cores of these machine will require regular monitoring and maintenance - and this will be a complex, hyper specialised job.
The other special problem is that in 'normal' operation robot workers will constantly suffer wear and tear and frequent or near constant damage. Your human manual worker takes constant knocks and minor abuses to their body everyday in their job, these just heal. For every one the robot has to call out maintenance.
Actually the best real apps for Strong AI look like office work, large scale management, writing software, creative work, brain surgeons, monitoring CCTV systems, 'home' systems, autonomous cars. Its more likely to replace people like CEO's and executives than fast food workers or farmers or the guy carrying the mail. In certain kinds of maths and science work Strong AI's will really excel - especially things like DNA and genetic analysis and comprehension. The main manual jobs AI's are actually likely to threaten are things like truck drivers, pilots, taxi drivers - and even in these jobs they will probably still need humans watching the machines.
". . . I reject the idea that science is logical, purely rational, that it is detached and value-free, and that it is, for all these reasons, morally superior. Spock-ism gives us a false picture of science. It gives us a false picture of humankind's situation. We are not disinterested knowers. The natural world is not a puzzle.... The big challenge for atheism is not God; it is that of providing an alternative to Spock-ism. We need an account of our place in the world that leaves room for value." "
But true science at its heart must be truly rational or it is not really science at all. If you don't see natural world as a puzzle then you are not seeing it scientifically.
If we are choosing archetypes for science then I would choose Spock as a pretty good one.
The real truth should be on the other foot - far more can be achieved by analysing emotions and religion and empathy using 'cold' empirical logic. Human thought and emotion are extremely logical, love is a beautiful example of object driven logic. Religion on the other hand, to much logic and it crumbles to dust and blows away in the wind. Another thing that logic highlights is that religion has almost nothing to do with God, it is really all about total social control, ie the enslavement of the simple minded heard, the sheeple (baaa baaa...).
Ultimately science and logic reaches the Anthropic Question and this basically proves that God exists - however the real thing isn't anything like the God/Gods of religion. - This real scientific 'God' doesn't care about good or evil, humans and the Earth are pretty irrelevant to it, it doesn't have a mind in the way we understand it, you cant talk to it. In fact it is dead, it only existed during the moment of the big bang - a mindless force (a quantum order seeking force), a wave of expanding energy, physics....
Funny thing I heard a few months ago. A type of mini nuke the US once deployed in Germany called an M29, W54 'Davy Crockett' had two safety features to stop it accidentally detonating.. One was a ranging timing / acceleration device that prevented the nuke from going off before it had been fired and then detonated once it had reached the correct position.. The other was an arming on off switch. Don't worry they were apparently also protected by being kept in boxes locked with padlocks..
An interesting statistic is that nuclear protest has indirectly killed some 5 to 10 million people by promoting the burning of fossil fuels especially coal. That puts nuclear protest at historically some 100 to 1000 times more dangerous than nuclear power. For nuclear power to kill as many as nuclear protest we would need a Chernobyl about every year....
You don't know what you are talking about. Anything that's a safety issue should be a part of the specification and would reject a part that is unsafe. The real truth is that the two parts are probably absolutely identical except for some trivial detail. It is a terrible example anyway, the nuclear regulators are notoriously bureaucratic and a lot of these 'safety' issues are likely to be purely paper trails. People who haven't come across EU bureaucracy have no idea, a document I came across last year - a 400 page specification on how to fill in a form written in labyrinthine legalese, with 20 pages just on boasting on how they have improved the simplicity of the paperwork verses the previous version. And that was for something a lot simpler than nuclear regulation.
Dou! The thing is if you want to put all this stuff into orbit -self running autonomous factories and so on - the first thing you will need is a bigger rocket - a much much bigger rocket. (like 100 or 500 tons to GEO or more) What we really need for the expansion into space whichever way we do it is a rebuild and reimagining of something like the old 'Sea Dragon' project. If you want to move a lot of cargo (or hundreds of passengers) you need to build big.. Its Simple!!!
These machines will need / have full redundancy. A second completely independent electronic system that can take control and bring the car to a safe emergency stop in case of any system failure. Both systems will have EMI / EMP protection plus protected power supplies. Early systems will be very expensive. - I see real danger with cheaper economy systems that skimp on safety - wouldn't be surprised if safety reuses eventually keep machines like driverless cars permanently expensive..
The beautiful simple answer is that in most driverless cars when you want to drive you drive, when you don't you let the car drive. I have an illness that means I cant drive, in what way would a driverless car not benefit me??? The biggest market for these things will be old people who cant drive or who are unsafe on the roads - putting them in driverless cars will radically improve safety.
The Google system looks very impressive. The way it works is not so different to a true Strong AI. I know because I am working on building a true intelligent Strong AI machine. The main differences are that a true strong AII will be far more adaptive and its vision will be more human like. On the negative it will make more potential mistakes in its learning process than maybe than a purely heuristic system, and is likely to have problems connecting to technology like GPS and severe problems with systems such as online mapping systems or local road sensors..
Slashdot Mirror
It's not meant to be brain hurting territory.
It's like how zero gravity isn't possible on earth, but if you take. . . p>
Its funny, as I understand it zero gravity isn't really possible anywhere inside our universe. In things like parabolic dives or orbital trajectories there is no change in actual gravity, the vehicle is merely accelerating to compensate. One of the main reasons why you cant do sensible gravity engine research within about 1 to 2 Earth diameters of the planets surface.
.. . . that old television series, allo allo? Racist to the French and the Germans. ...
You also forgot racist to the Italians and above all the British. BTW I suspect you are not getting the humour, it is not really racist it is really making humour about old cultural stereotypes. . . If anything it is gently anti-racist . . it is the BBC after all.
That's the whole problem with peer review, its become a total gravy train and a way for the big universities of constantly diverting more funds back to themselves. Its also a box closed to outsiders. If you are talented and have a great research idea but are outside the system forget it - there's a lot mediocrity that needs funding first.
When I was at university (in the UK) looking to go on to a research degree I spent a little time with some of the postdocs and they were the most demoralised drained looking bunch of people I ever met in my life. A couple of years later - after absolutely everything had gone wrong for me I ended up homeless and spent a few months on the streets of LA - the homeless had better moral than the post docs..
There's always a shortage of talented people in almost any field, especially science or engineering.
Its almost like a degree is a certificate of incompetence -it merely means your incompetent to do the job badly. The top engineers BTW you could be looking at a million dollars a year or more, though of course its far more in some fields than others. ..
If they based the rules of consent of Adult reasoning, some kids would be having sex at ten, others still wouldn't be allowed to at 50..
One of our school bus drivers used to do that - also while reading the newspaper. (this was Northumberland UK) Mind you the bus was an ancient relic and could only do about 30-40 mph. Ahhh the days before health and safety...
Imagine if some terrorist walked on board wearing nothing but women's undergarments. Talk about causing terror in anyone that sees him!
To be fair that is quite terror inducing. I have just pictured Osama wearing nothing but women's underwear waiting in a security line. Pass the mind bleach please. Everyone within sight range will be traumatised for life!
A bomb is much more humane.
Osama doing that today, now that would be truly scary :D (Mind you if the terrorist was young pretty and still alive...)
Real engineering is always a compromise between different sets of bad choices..
I used to feel that way about the Shuttle. It did have a lot of problems but it did also achieve a major advance of technology. The Shuttle was a first step to building truly reusable spacecraft in the future. Everything says that if Bush hadn't cancelled the Shuttle replacement it would probably be in service by now and would have been massively more capable than what we are building.
The key to the Shuttle though was the space tug - and it was basically Reagan who cancelled that. The space tug needed a nuclear rocket to achieve its full potential, and due to nuclear paranoia in the early 80's that was no longer expedient. We still need nuclear rocketry today to do most of the big things in space - like manned missions to Mars or beyond, or large scale lunar bases or asteroid mining, etc, etc.
Sorry that would only make sense if temperature was a circle. Degrees is a nomenclature - and temperature has a range of millions or ... billions of degrees. - That would be a lot of circles..
No sorry you lose me on Fahrenheit, Celsius is much more logical. In physics anyway Kelvin is based on the Celsius scale with 100 degrees between freezing and boiling, with the zero point moved to absolute zero. I was taught both as a kid but have always used Celsius, can never get my head around Fahrenheit - even the conversion between them is awful.
Not like 2.5 cm = 1 inch, or 2.2 Kg = 1 lb, or 1 m = 3 feet, or 1.6 km = 1 mile which I can all remember off the top of my head...
I may be being pessimistic here but I don't believe such a system actually exits. The problem is that its phenomenally difficult to write something that can do all that you want but also be simple and easy to use. A very crude solution might be a basic database to store your lookup archive with a basic lookup code on each record, and a (manual) file store using directories to store the videos. A pain in the arse to use but at least you don't get chained into a system that's pretty much guaranteed to reach a critical mass then fall over. The problem as ever is that you are making the users the coders - and because they will mess up constantly they need a system that is heavily patrolled and administrated...
An alternative is some kind of submissions system that passes all the complexity of building the system to a dedicated admin/ coding team.
Ironically I am working on a system that can do stuff exactly like this and automate it fully, but its still 10 years (at least) from being a working machine even as a prototype. (its Strong AI)
This is almost exactly the vulnerability I identified in Linux and other Unixes in about 2002. I was looking for a totally secure type of OS for running a machine that needed very high security. It was only really a guess or a hunch but the shell looked like one of the biggest weak points, another for my app was fork - the biggest weakness of all though was the shear complexity of the whole unix system.
My design was abandoned because a suitable OS couldn't be found, and is now being reimagined as running raw on FPGA hardware - with a thin bespoke OS layer.
The ultimate example of this kind of holier than thou science is General Relativity. And behind general relativities mathematical hedge is a simple stupid secret - the theory fails totally at FTL speeds. General Relativity depends on a rule that defines a totally unstable FTL space and effectively rules out the existence of a large or old universe. In short behind its perfection at STL speeds general relativity is utter rubbish.
The real question is why. Military conspiracy theory? (at the paranoid heart of the cold war) Stupidity? Too many drugs? (...) or simply a joke to test the intelligence of other scientists?
No-one will probably ever read this post ... mutter..
I work in this field and there is something about these machines that you are missing. Firstly your human replacement robot worker is going to cost about $300,000 to build then maybe up to $40,000 to $50,000 per year in maintenance. How will humans compete with that? (Don't expect those prices to fall much with mass production either.)
In fact robots might not reduce the actual workforce that much because each will require the equivalent of roughly one permanent human worker to keep it running and that worker will need to be a highly trained engineer. People seem to have some kind of mental comparison that puts these machines as somehow equivalent to cars - in reality they are far more complicated - like say jet helicopters - or maybe spacecraft - they are actually probably more complicated than either.
These machines are immensely complicated, they have thousands of moving parts, tens of thousands of tiny wires and connectors and circuits, all packed into tiny difficult fiddly spaces. Even the software cores of these machine will require regular monitoring and maintenance - and this will be a complex, hyper specialised job.
The other special problem is that in 'normal' operation robot workers will constantly suffer wear and tear and frequent or near constant damage. Your human manual worker takes constant knocks and minor abuses to their body everyday in their job, these just heal. For every one the robot has to call out maintenance.
Actually the best real apps for Strong AI look like office work, large scale management, writing software, creative work, brain surgeons, monitoring CCTV systems, 'home' systems, autonomous cars. Its more likely to replace people like CEO's and executives than fast food workers or farmers or the guy carrying the mail. In certain kinds of maths and science work Strong AI's will really excel - especially things like DNA and genetic analysis and comprehension.
The main manual jobs AI's are actually likely to threaten are things like truck drivers, pilots, taxi drivers - and even in these jobs they will probably still need humans watching the machines.
The Star Trek version does require a global nuclear war first, and then a hundred years of crawling back from the ruins. And then you get Khan. ...
". . . I reject the idea that science is logical, purely rational, that it is detached and value-free, and that it is, for all these reasons, morally superior. Spock-ism gives us a false picture of science. It gives us a false picture of humankind's situation. We are not disinterested knowers. The natural world is not a puzzle. ... The big challenge for atheism is not God; it is that of providing an alternative to Spock-ism. We need an account of our place in the world that leaves room for value." "
But true science at its heart must be truly rational or it is not really science at all.
If you don't see natural world as a puzzle then you are not seeing it scientifically.
If we are choosing archetypes for science then I would choose Spock as a pretty good one.
The real truth should be on the other foot - far more can be achieved by analysing emotions and religion and empathy using 'cold' empirical logic.
Human thought and emotion are extremely logical, love is a beautiful example of object driven logic.
Religion on the other hand, to much logic and it crumbles to dust and blows away in the wind.
Another thing that logic highlights is that religion has almost nothing to do with God, it is really all about total social control, ie the enslavement of the simple minded heard, the sheeple (baaa baaa...).
Ultimately science and logic reaches the Anthropic Question and this basically proves that God exists - however the real thing isn't anything like the God/Gods of religion. - This real scientific 'God' doesn't care about good or evil, humans and the Earth are pretty irrelevant to it, it doesn't have a mind in the way we understand it, you cant talk to it. In fact it is dead, it only existed during the moment of the big bang - a mindless force (a quantum order seeking force), a wave of expanding energy, physics....
Funny thing I heard a few months ago. A type of mini nuke the US once deployed in Germany called an M29, W54 'Davy Crockett' had two safety features to stop it accidentally detonating.. One was a ranging timing / acceleration device that prevented the nuke from going off before it had been fired and then detonated once it had reached the correct position.. The other was an arming on off switch. Don't worry they were apparently also protected by being kept in boxes locked with padlocks..
An interesting statistic is that nuclear protest has indirectly killed some 5 to 10 million people by promoting the burning of fossil fuels especially coal.
That puts nuclear protest at historically some 100 to 1000 times more dangerous than nuclear power.
For nuclear power to kill as many as nuclear protest we would need a Chernobyl about every year....
You don't know what you are talking about. Anything that's a safety issue should be a part of the specification and would reject a part that is unsafe. The real truth is that the two parts are probably absolutely identical except for some trivial detail. It is a terrible example anyway, the nuclear regulators are notoriously bureaucratic and a lot of these 'safety' issues are likely to be purely paper trails. People who haven't come across EU bureaucracy have no idea, a document I came across last year - a 400 page specification on how to fill in a form written in labyrinthine legalese, with 20 pages just on boasting on how they have improved the simplicity of the paperwork verses the previous version. And that was for something a lot simpler than nuclear regulation.
Dou! The thing is if you want to put all this stuff into orbit -self running autonomous factories and so on - the first thing you will need is a bigger rocket - a much much bigger rocket. (like 100 or 500 tons to GEO or more) What we really need for the expansion into space whichever way we do it is a rebuild and reimagining of something like the old 'Sea Dragon' project. If you want to move a lot of cargo (or hundreds of passengers) you need to build big.. Its Simple!!!
These machines will need / have full redundancy. A second completely independent electronic system that can take control and bring the car to a safe emergency stop in case of any system failure. Both systems will have EMI / EMP protection plus protected power supplies. Early systems will be very expensive. - I see real danger with cheaper economy systems that skimp on safety - wouldn't be surprised if safety reuses eventually keep machines like driverless cars permanently expensive..
The beautiful simple answer is that in most driverless cars when you want to drive you drive, when you don't you let the car drive. I have an illness that means I cant drive, in what way would a driverless car not benefit me??? The biggest market for these things will be old people who cant drive or who are unsafe on the roads - putting them in driverless cars will radically improve safety.
A simple ballpark figure is about $15,000 to $25,000 extra to fit a car with a full Strong AI system - but that will probably be 2025 or later..
The Google system looks very impressive. The way it works is not so different to a true Strong AI. I know because I am working on building a true intelligent Strong AI machine. The main differences are that a true strong AII will be far more adaptive and its vision will be more human like. On the negative it will make more potential mistakes in its learning process than maybe than a purely heuristic system, and is likely to have problems connecting to technology like GPS and severe problems with systems such as online mapping systems or local road sensors..