Yes, when people have the opportunity to behave like fools in public, they will sometimes do that. If you make something public knowledge, it is your fault, not Facebook's, or Google's or the pharmacy's.
The scenario you are giving is a SPECIFICALLY PROTECTED piece of information that will never legally be disclosed to an advertising agency anyway. And that's the best argument you can come up with against targeted advertising "in a broader sense"? That's why it's FUD, and that's why your point fails. If you don't want to disclose more information than you are comfortable disclosing... don't. Facebook doesn't make you fill out a billion question survey to join. Facebook doesn't even force you to join.
1) Target you specifically; 2) Hack into Facebook's servers to steal your data; 3) Repeat #2 until they find out you've posted an "on vacation!" status; 4) Break into your house to steal your shitty $50 clock radio;
Is this reasonable? Geeks here are so fond of reminding people "security through obscurity isn't secure." If the only thing preventing people from stealing all your stuff is that they can't see your Facebook status updates, you might want to invest in some basic locks & deadbolts, and maybe a cheap security system if you have enough "expensive stuff" to warrant it.
I mean, seriously, if you go for a prescription to clear up an "infection of a personal nature", do you want to be inundated with ads for anti-itch cream, condoms, yeast infections, incontinence products, free clinics and whatnot? It's like when people say "if you have nothing to hide, why do you have secrets?" -- some information is personal, and isn't really intended to be spread around to everybody.
Good thing this isn't happening, then, right? FUD.
Your scenario has nothing to do with "location awareness," and since the pharmacy isn't selling your PERSONAL MEDICAL RECORDS WHICH ARE PROTECTED BY LAW to Google already, this change to Facebook won't alter the terrain at all in this space. Facebook letting you check in with, "At the pharmacy getting some jock itch cream and antibiotics for a raging case of pecker rot LOL!", is the ONLY way that an advertiser would know about your case of pecker rot, and if *you* disclose this information publicly, it's your own fault.
Except you would have to specifically check in from the abortion clinic. If you don't check in, then how are they going to know that you were at an abortion clinic?
And if you do check in, maybe you want people to know you're there, and also don't mind getting the occasional advertisement for "abortion clinics near you right now," just in case you ever get the urge to have one on a whim - because we all know that elective abortions are the new trucker hat for the hipster set.
Do you see how STUPID and baseless this concern is yet?
(And as far as targeted advertising... you realize that *other* people wouldn't see abortion clinic ads on YOUR facebook page... right? The point of targeted advertising is not, "Here's a bunch of shit the person you're looking at likes and does!" It's "here's a bunch of shit you might like, while you look at this person's page.")
Correction: "We know exactly where you are when you check in on your GPS-enabled mobile device which is running our app which you specifically had to load, open, and click "Check In" on, and that is the only time we know where you are."
Unless you're really suggesting that this app is transmitting a constant stream of GPS location data back to Facebook?
As far as what advertisements to serve me, how is that a problem? Seeing information about businesses near your current location is a bad thing, exactly how?
The product was announced yesterday afternoon (Aug 18), at about 7:30 EST. "The iPhone app will go live on Aug 18" means "it's live today, the date of the announcement, Aug. 18, 2010, but the Places service won't be turned on until August 19th, 2010, so you won't be able to use the iPhone app to check in to that service until tomorrow, Aug. 19th."
Oh, and if you're going to reply telling me that the Iphone is more popular, have the decency to look up actual market data
Step away from the keyboard and calm down a little. You're way too invested in hating on the iphone.
Those other platforms may have more market share - but do they have a bigger market share of FACEBOOK users in the US, which is where this service is rolling out first? Most "mobile" updates I see from people come from Android or Iphone devices, so I'd say that it would certainly fit with my experiences that iPhone & Android constitute a majority devices where the facebook app is installed.
RIM has a huge market share... and a lot of that market share is business phones, which are locked down. My company wouldn't appreciate me installing Facebook and a bunch of other random apps on my business phone. Looking down my Facebook newsfeed right now, I see 0 people using a Blackberry to post updates, 5 individuals using an iphone, 2 using Android, and 2 using Palm WebOS. Despite that, I know at least 22 of my Facebook "friends" have blackberries - but they're corporate devices.
Except most neighbors will never even think to question someone who is reasonably clean-cut looking wearing khakis, a blue or black polo shirt, and carrying a clipboard. And if they do question you, you have a reasonable cover story ready to explain why you're there, and when the neighbor says, "I think they're out of town," you say "Hmm, okay, I guess I'll try back in a week or so," and leave. Maybe you carry a few brochures from a painting company or something with you, and hand one to the neighbor, and say "If you're interested, give us a call!"
Honestly, do you think thieves show up wearing ski masks and carrying burlap sacks over their shoulder to cart away all your stuff?
The random crackhead who shows up looking to steal your stereo probably isn't using Facebook to find you. The "professional" who might use Facebook to select you doesn't need it.
It inherits the same sharing permissions as who can see your contact info. I have contact info set to "friends only", and "places I check in" now also shows up as "Friends only".
Of course, you ALSO HAVE TO ACTUALLY CHECK IN on a mobile device for any of this to be relevant, as well.
Unless you make a habit of friending people on Facebook who you expect to rob you, I'm really not certain I see the big issue; If you make a habit of leaving your Facebook info open to the world, then "oh noes dey robbin mah apahtmint" is probably the least of your worries, and you should go check your credit report asap.
If someone is determined enough to rob your sweet Sony Hifi, they're not going to sit there and go, "Gee, now what do I do, I can't see his Facebook to tell when he's out of town." There are plenty of ways to determine this without needing Facebook, and I'd venture a guess that MOST thieves aren't in the habit of trolling facebook for targets, when they have a whole world full of houses and apartments that are empty most of the day out there to pick from.
Interesting to know - but as a mostly uninformed sort... is this an argument for using some sort of other term for them, or does this suggest that there is NOT a 1:1 correlation between physical bits and virtual bits?
I'm not clear on what you're trying to say here, other than to share this info about how it works.
If there's a 1:1 correlation between "number of physical bits" and "number of virtual bits"... does it really matter? "Megabyte" being binary or decimal matters, because they're different sizes with the same name - a "binary" megabyte (1024^2 bytes) and a "decimal" megabyte (10^6 bytes) hold different amounts of data.
A "physical" bit on this storage, and a "virtual" bit in memory hold the same amount of data, from what the article says... so why would this cause all kinds of confusion? One is the physical implementation, one is the software representation of it.
I agree - and as somebody who is actively investigating a career change into a medical field, this is something I've read a fair amount about in the past year or so.
Impaired doctors shouldn't be allowed to practice, and there does seem to be a growing awareness that the practice of marathon shifts for doctors is actively causing harm to the doctors and to their patients. We don't let them operate drunk (or we discipline them and even de-license them if they do), we absolutely should not expect (or ask) them to do their job when they're exhausted in a normal civilian/peacetime/non-crisis environment.
Having spent some time with the military, I can attest to what sleep deprivation can do to you - I've done the 48+-hours-awake thing, and I wouldn't feel comfortable doing anything requiring clear thought and steady hands at the end of that, or even 30 hours into it. You get to the point where you're pretty much a zombie.
So yes, I definitely agree - there should be some regulation of the hours that doctors are expected to work in a "normal" workday. Exceptions for crisis situations and massive emergencies, obviously, but exhaustion should not be the standard operating mode for our medical personnel.
I don't think you have to be as mentally "with it" as a doctor needs to be with his patients to drive a car safely, so no, I don't think a mental aptitude & coordination test is required every time you get behind the wheel - that's what licensing is for, you've proven that you can handle a vehicle safely; I would, however, support periodic retesting (say every 3-5 years?) for license renewals, with police being able to flag you for a retest at their discretion if you are ticketed or in an accident and there is no good explanation for why you drove off the road, or rear-ended the guy in front of you.
I'm not implying that there is some true blueprint that we are evolving towards, but one need only look at current life on earth to suggest that a 6 fingered or tailed human evolving from rhodesiensis is very unlikely since they had neither.
But these are mutations that still occasionally occur in h. sapiens - polydactyly occurs in ~1-in-500 births, I'm sure it could have happened to h. rhodesiensis as well... and really, the question is, would that difference be selected *against* enough that it would be killed off? A vestigial tail is less likely, certainly; but as far as varied morphology, you can see differences in facial characteristics between human racial groups easily enough today - and I swear I'm not trolling or trying to make a racist joke here.
The point is, these hypothetical descendants of h. rhodesiensis probably would look very similar to how we do today, and we would probably be very biologically similar - perhaps even reproductively compatible, but we might have different standard features as a result of "re-evolving" from that ancestor. I think it's also likely that if you knock out ancestors farther and farther back in the evolutionary chain, the modern results will grow even more divergent than they might be if you knocked out the first true homo sapiens and then waited for the next step to crop up from h. rhodesiensis again. And you're right, the course of our technological development would probably differ as well, with more and more divergence the more time goes by.
Parallel / convergent evolution (your example of eyes) are certainly accepted, and it's likely that "similar" things *would* evolve... but the process is very much analog - lots of fuzz and wiggle room go into what mutations get selected for, and which one is going to "win out" in the end; it's entirely possible that if we knocked out the first plant ancestor that had chlorophyll, today we'd have a very different idea of "plant life" - maybe plants would have evolved symbiotic relationships with bacteria or other microorganisms (think lichens, but with lithotrophs or organotrophs, rather than the chlorophyll-containing microorganisms they use currently), or developed more like fungus (extract energy from organics in the soil), or maybe it would evolve some other chemical that is also capable of doing the work that chlorophyll does, such as bacteriorhodopsin in haloarchaea taking the place of chlorophyll.
I would be astonished that in that situation provided rhodesiensis still survived and the environment remained relatively similar if Homo Sapiens didn't evolve again - that is, whatever evolutionary pressure pushed rhodesiensis into being more sapiens-like if it was still around should cause a similar evolutionary outcome.
Because evolution is full of dead ends, and species that diversify to fill their niches. Assuming that homo sapiens could have evolved "again" from h. rhodesiensis is not an incredible stretch, but it's just as possible that we'd have evolved into a species that looks mostly the same, but with 6 fingers, or a different shape to our nose, or a couple extra or a couple fewer teeth, or maybe a tiny hairless vestigial tail that we could wag at one another.
The problem is, your argument would result in a remarkably lower biodiversity than we see at present - there is not "one form only" that is suited for living in a forest, or living in the ocean. Numerous species with varying degrees of variation can all be perfectly well suited for their environmental conditions - evolution is not a deterministic process - selection pressures work on the mutations and variations that arise in a population, there is not some end blueprint that they're working towards.
Because my ethics are not simply a function of fear of punishment by my employer? If my employer treats me poorly, I leave and find a new job with an employer who will treat me better. Being treated poorly prompts me to find a new job, but it doesn't entitle me to behave unethically to exact some sort of stupid "revenge" against my employer. Losing capable engineers to their competition is punishment enough for them.
The main thing we have going for is over the next 20 years is that we don't have to model the human brain before we can begin understanding. Modeling the 100k neurons in a fruit fly might teach us a lot, and then modeling the 15M in a rat could teach us everything we need to model the human brain, except that elusive secret of self-awareness.
Absolutely - nothing I've said should be construed that I believe we are pursuing a "futile" goal - even if we never "completely" understand the brain, 1, 5, 10, even 20% understanding could reveal useful and amazing things.
The modeling complexity to go from several neurons to a functional brain is probably going to be a lot more of an exponential curve than a linear plot, however - my point is that I think the timeline Kurzweil lays out (10 years to a model of the brain) is so ridiculously optimistic that it's a fantasy.
Will we have a working model in 20, 50, 100 years? I think it gets much more likely towards the end of that sentence. Even those, I think are pretty optimistic timelines - but 10 years is simply fantasy.
Most cars have a dome light in them. Illumination isn't that big of a deal - if it can kill the ignition, I'm sure they can also add a switch to allow it to turn on the dome light when it's being used.
As far as reviewing the pictures - why not? It's part of a probation, you generally have to meet with someone (parole officer, social worker, something) when on parole - so set it up so that when you go in, the images are taken off the device and reviewed quickly by your case worker or parole officer. Humans are pretty good at visual pattern recognition, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't take more than 5 minutes or so to scan through a hundred or so photos to see if you are the person pictured using the device in them, unless you happen to have an identical twin or freakishly similar doppelganger.
Knowing that the image is in the device, and if you circumvent it and then get in trouble, you're going to be in even worse trouble should be enough to discourage all but the most determined abusers, anyway.
Hmm... and you see no potential for it to match people with similar interests at all? "People who like X, Y, and Z have also liked A and B in this town - you should check it out!" Amazon, Netflix, and others already do this sort of taste-oriented marketing, I see no reason why other companies couldn't do the same.
And, if you're the sort who's interested in "trying something new," it doesn't take much deductive reasoning to say "Hmm... I know what Starbucks is, I know what Friday's is, but this little taco place I've never heard of looks local, and looks popular..."
Of course there will always be systems that can be gamed, and people who will be susceptible to it. Friday's will always spend more money on advertising than the local taco stand. Why not offer an option to filter out "non-local" and "franchise" results? Or instead of selling advertising, charge a reasonable monthly service fee, or offer a "premium" paid membership that will allow you to say "don't give advertisers priority"?
I'd pay a couple bucks a month for a service like this, and I think you might find other people would too, if the filters were reasonably well put together to allow you to find things easily.
Again, there's a lot of potential. There are ways to address all of these problems, and simply throwing your hands up and saying "people suck," isn't going to cut it.
If by "complex, but not overly complex," you mean that there are numerous feedback loops in the brain that we still have no idea how they work at all, then yeah, sure, it's not complex at all.
There is funadmentally very little difference in the brain between hardware and software - chemicals cause changes in the brain's 'wiring,' and changes in the brain's 'wiring' cause different areas to behave differently with respect to the chemicals they respond to and produce, which can cause further 'hardware' and 'software' changes. You are drastically oversimplifying brain biology, or drastically underestimating the sheer numbers of moving parts involved in the brain's anatomy. As I said in another post - 256 bit encryption theoretically has a finite number of hashes; that doesn't mean we could practically hope to generate them all in any reasonable amount of time.
Each of the 100 billion or so neurons makes an average of several thousand connections with neighboring neurons. In any given neuron, any one (or multiple) of those synapses can be firing, with multiple possible neurotransmitters in an array of varying concentrations at any moment. We MIGHT be able to build a reasonably workable, if simplistic, model of a couple neurons. This is not anywhere close to being a brain.
We are nowhere near having the computing power (or the understanding of brain chemistry) to model hundreds of billions of neurons, each with thousands of synapses, all firing with & RESPONDING to various neurotransmitters, plus the feedback and regulatory loops that govern those neurons, plus the regions & structures inside the brain governing various functions and pathways... we are just scratching the surface.
Will we understand it someday? We'll surely get a lot closer than we are now. Will that day be 2020? Nope.
I think it's a pretty safe bet that circuits in TEN YEARS will look substantially similar to the way they look now - a little smaller, perhaps. Kurzweil has predicted TEN YEARS from now, we will have done it - not 200 years.
So:
1) we have to first understand the brain (haven't managed it in the 60+ years since DNA was first described);
2) we have to completely reinvent the computer circuit (again, 60+ years, and we're still working with transistors);
3) we have to somehow design & build a system that will simulate that extremely complex system, using our new understanding and the new circuitry we've developed.
And kurzweil is predicting it'll all happen by 2020. Does that sound even remotely likely to you?
Problem: this scenario you describe assumes that you can take a bunch of average students, and by somehow putting them together in parallel, you'll get the theory of relativity out of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, when people have the opportunity to behave like fools in public, they will sometimes do that. If you make something public knowledge, it is your fault, not Facebook's, or Google's or the pharmacy's.
The scenario you are giving is a SPECIFICALLY PROTECTED piece of information that will never legally be disclosed to an advertising agency anyway. And that's the best argument you can come up with against targeted advertising "in a broader sense"? That's why it's FUD, and that's why your point fails. If you don't want to disclose more information than you are comfortable disclosing... don't. Facebook doesn't make you fill out a billion question survey to join. Facebook doesn't even force you to join.
So somebody is going to:
1) Target you specifically;
2) Hack into Facebook's servers to steal your data;
3) Repeat #2 until they find out you've posted an "on vacation!" status;
4) Break into your house to steal your shitty $50 clock radio;
Is this reasonable? Geeks here are so fond of reminding people "security through obscurity isn't secure." If the only thing preventing people from stealing all your stuff is that they can't see your Facebook status updates, you might want to invest in some basic locks & deadbolts, and maybe a cheap security system if you have enough "expensive stuff" to warrant it.
Good thing this isn't happening, then, right? FUD.
Your scenario has nothing to do with "location awareness," and since the pharmacy isn't selling your PERSONAL MEDICAL RECORDS WHICH ARE PROTECTED BY LAW to Google already, this change to Facebook won't alter the terrain at all in this space. Facebook letting you check in with, "At the pharmacy getting some jock itch cream and antibiotics for a raging case of pecker rot LOL!", is the ONLY way that an advertiser would know about your case of pecker rot, and if *you* disclose this information publicly, it's your own fault.
You get a cut - it's called reduced prices. Now stop bitching.
Except you would have to specifically check in from the abortion clinic. If you don't check in, then how are they going to know that you were at an abortion clinic?
And if you do check in, maybe you want people to know you're there, and also don't mind getting the occasional advertisement for "abortion clinics near you right now," just in case you ever get the urge to have one on a whim - because we all know that elective abortions are the new trucker hat for the hipster set.
Do you see how STUPID and baseless this concern is yet?
(And as far as targeted advertising... you realize that *other* people wouldn't see abortion clinic ads on YOUR facebook page... right? The point of targeted advertising is not, "Here's a bunch of shit the person you're looking at likes and does!" It's "here's a bunch of shit you might like, while you look at this person's page.")
Correction: "We know exactly where you are when you check in on your GPS-enabled mobile device which is running our app which you specifically had to load, open, and click "Check In" on, and that is the only time we know where you are."
Unless you're really suggesting that this app is transmitting a constant stream of GPS location data back to Facebook?
As far as what advertisements to serve me, how is that a problem? Seeing information about businesses near your current location is a bad thing, exactly how?
It's slashdot. There's a delay. You know this.
The product was announced yesterday afternoon (Aug 18), at about 7:30 EST. "The iPhone app will go live on Aug 18" means "it's live today, the date of the announcement, Aug. 18, 2010, but the Places service won't be turned on until August 19th, 2010, so you won't be able to use the iPhone app to check in to that service until tomorrow, Aug. 19th."
Step away from the keyboard and calm down a little. You're way too invested in hating on the iphone.
Those other platforms may have more market share - but do they have a bigger market share of FACEBOOK users in the US, which is where this service is rolling out first? Most "mobile" updates I see from people come from Android or Iphone devices, so I'd say that it would certainly fit with my experiences that iPhone & Android constitute a majority devices where the facebook app is installed.
RIM has a huge market share... and a lot of that market share is business phones, which are locked down. My company wouldn't appreciate me installing Facebook and a bunch of other random apps on my business phone. Looking down my Facebook newsfeed right now, I see 0 people using a Blackberry to post updates, 5 individuals using an iphone, 2 using Android, and 2 using Palm WebOS. Despite that, I know at least 22 of my Facebook "friends" have blackberries - but they're corporate devices.
But, but... stupid FUD is only bad when Microsoft does it. When it's being used against Facebook, it's okay!
Except most neighbors will never even think to question someone who is reasonably clean-cut looking wearing khakis, a blue or black polo shirt, and carrying a clipboard. And if they do question you, you have a reasonable cover story ready to explain why you're there, and when the neighbor says, "I think they're out of town," you say "Hmm, okay, I guess I'll try back in a week or so," and leave. Maybe you carry a few brochures from a painting company or something with you, and hand one to the neighbor, and say "If you're interested, give us a call!"
Honestly, do you think thieves show up wearing ski masks and carrying burlap sacks over their shoulder to cart away all your stuff?
The random crackhead who shows up looking to steal your stereo probably isn't using Facebook to find you. The "professional" who might use Facebook to select you doesn't need it.
It inherits the same sharing permissions as who can see your contact info. I have contact info set to "friends only", and "places I check in" now also shows up as "Friends only".
Of course, you ALSO HAVE TO ACTUALLY CHECK IN on a mobile device for any of this to be relevant, as well.
Unless you make a habit of friending people on Facebook who you expect to rob you, I'm really not certain I see the big issue; If you make a habit of leaving your Facebook info open to the world, then "oh noes dey robbin mah apahtmint" is probably the least of your worries, and you should go check your credit report asap.
If someone is determined enough to rob your sweet Sony Hifi, they're not going to sit there and go, "Gee, now what do I do, I can't see his Facebook to tell when he's out of town." There are plenty of ways to determine this without needing Facebook, and I'd venture a guess that MOST thieves aren't in the habit of trolling facebook for targets, when they have a whole world full of houses and apartments that are empty most of the day out there to pick from.
Interesting to know - but as a mostly uninformed sort... is this an argument for using some sort of other term for them, or does this suggest that there is NOT a 1:1 correlation between physical bits and virtual bits?
I'm not clear on what you're trying to say here, other than to share this info about how it works.
If there's a 1:1 correlation between "number of physical bits" and "number of virtual bits"... does it really matter? "Megabyte" being binary or decimal matters, because they're different sizes with the same name - a "binary" megabyte (1024^2 bytes) and a "decimal" megabyte (10^6 bytes) hold different amounts of data.
A "physical" bit on this storage, and a "virtual" bit in memory hold the same amount of data, from what the article says... so why would this cause all kinds of confusion? One is the physical implementation, one is the software representation of it.
I agree - and as somebody who is actively investigating a career change into a medical field, this is something I've read a fair amount about in the past year or so.
Impaired doctors shouldn't be allowed to practice, and there does seem to be a growing awareness that the practice of marathon shifts for doctors is actively causing harm to the doctors and to their patients. We don't let them operate drunk (or we discipline them and even de-license them if they do), we absolutely should not expect (or ask) them to do their job when they're exhausted in a normal civilian/peacetime/non-crisis environment.
Having spent some time with the military, I can attest to what sleep deprivation can do to you - I've done the 48+-hours-awake thing, and I wouldn't feel comfortable doing anything requiring clear thought and steady hands at the end of that, or even 30 hours into it. You get to the point where you're pretty much a zombie.
So yes, I definitely agree - there should be some regulation of the hours that doctors are expected to work in a "normal" workday. Exceptions for crisis situations and massive emergencies, obviously, but exhaustion should not be the standard operating mode for our medical personnel.
I don't think you have to be as mentally "with it" as a doctor needs to be with his patients to drive a car safely, so no, I don't think a mental aptitude & coordination test is required every time you get behind the wheel - that's what licensing is for, you've proven that you can handle a vehicle safely; I would, however, support periodic retesting (say every 3-5 years?) for license renewals, with police being able to flag you for a retest at their discretion if you are ticketed or in an accident and there is no good explanation for why you drove off the road, or rear-ended the guy in front of you.
But these are mutations that still occasionally occur in h. sapiens - polydactyly occurs in ~1-in-500 births, I'm sure it could have happened to h. rhodesiensis as well... and really, the question is, would that difference be selected *against* enough that it would be killed off? A vestigial tail is less likely, certainly; but as far as varied morphology, you can see differences in facial characteristics between human racial groups easily enough today - and I swear I'm not trolling or trying to make a racist joke here.
The point is, these hypothetical descendants of h. rhodesiensis probably would look very similar to how we do today, and we would probably be very biologically similar - perhaps even reproductively compatible, but we might have different standard features as a result of "re-evolving" from that ancestor. I think it's also likely that if you knock out ancestors farther and farther back in the evolutionary chain, the modern results will grow even more divergent than they might be if you knocked out the first true homo sapiens and then waited for the next step to crop up from h. rhodesiensis again. And you're right, the course of our technological development would probably differ as well, with more and more divergence the more time goes by.
Parallel / convergent evolution (your example of eyes) are certainly accepted, and it's likely that "similar" things *would* evolve... but the process is very much analog - lots of fuzz and wiggle room go into what mutations get selected for, and which one is going to "win out" in the end; it's entirely possible that if we knocked out the first plant ancestor that had chlorophyll, today we'd have a very different idea of "plant life" - maybe plants would have evolved symbiotic relationships with bacteria or other microorganisms (think lichens, but with lithotrophs or organotrophs, rather than the chlorophyll-containing microorganisms they use currently), or developed more like fungus (extract energy from organics in the soil), or maybe it would evolve some other chemical that is also capable of doing the work that chlorophyll does, such as bacteriorhodopsin in haloarchaea taking the place of chlorophyll.
Because evolution is full of dead ends, and species that diversify to fill their niches. Assuming that homo sapiens could have evolved "again" from h. rhodesiensis is not an incredible stretch, but it's just as possible that we'd have evolved into a species that looks mostly the same, but with 6 fingers, or a different shape to our nose, or a couple extra or a couple fewer teeth, or maybe a tiny hairless vestigial tail that we could wag at one another.
The problem is, your argument would result in a remarkably lower biodiversity than we see at present - there is not "one form only" that is suited for living in a forest, or living in the ocean. Numerous species with varying degrees of variation can all be perfectly well suited for their environmental conditions - evolution is not a deterministic process - selection pressures work on the mutations and variations that arise in a population, there is not some end blueprint that they're working towards.
Because my ethics are not simply a function of fear of punishment by my employer? If my employer treats me poorly, I leave and find a new job with an employer who will treat me better. Being treated poorly prompts me to find a new job, but it doesn't entitle me to behave unethically to exact some sort of stupid "revenge" against my employer. Losing capable engineers to their competition is punishment enough for them.
But on slashdot, we parse these things literally - if the word doesn't fit, you must acquit.
Absolutely - nothing I've said should be construed that I believe we are pursuing a "futile" goal - even if we never "completely" understand the brain, 1, 5, 10, even 20% understanding could reveal useful and amazing things.
The modeling complexity to go from several neurons to a functional brain is probably going to be a lot more of an exponential curve than a linear plot, however - my point is that I think the timeline Kurzweil lays out (10 years to a model of the brain) is so ridiculously optimistic that it's a fantasy.
Will we have a working model in 20, 50, 100 years? I think it gets much more likely towards the end of that sentence. Even those, I think are pretty optimistic timelines - but 10 years is simply fantasy.
Most cars have a dome light in them. Illumination isn't that big of a deal - if it can kill the ignition, I'm sure they can also add a switch to allow it to turn on the dome light when it's being used.
As far as reviewing the pictures - why not? It's part of a probation, you generally have to meet with someone (parole officer, social worker, something) when on parole - so set it up so that when you go in, the images are taken off the device and reviewed quickly by your case worker or parole officer. Humans are pretty good at visual pattern recognition, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't take more than 5 minutes or so to scan through a hundred or so photos to see if you are the person pictured using the device in them, unless you happen to have an identical twin or freakishly similar doppelganger.
Knowing that the image is in the device, and if you circumvent it and then get in trouble, you're going to be in even worse trouble should be enough to discourage all but the most determined abusers, anyway.
Hmm... and you see no potential for it to match people with similar interests at all? "People who like X, Y, and Z have also liked A and B in this town - you should check it out!" Amazon, Netflix, and others already do this sort of taste-oriented marketing, I see no reason why other companies couldn't do the same.
And, if you're the sort who's interested in "trying something new," it doesn't take much deductive reasoning to say "Hmm... I know what Starbucks is, I know what Friday's is, but this little taco place I've never heard of looks local, and looks popular..."
Of course there will always be systems that can be gamed, and people who will be susceptible to it. Friday's will always spend more money on advertising than the local taco stand. Why not offer an option to filter out "non-local" and "franchise" results? Or instead of selling advertising, charge a reasonable monthly service fee, or offer a "premium" paid membership that will allow you to say "don't give advertisers priority"?
I'd pay a couple bucks a month for a service like this, and I think you might find other people would too, if the filters were reasonably well put together to allow you to find things easily.
Again, there's a lot of potential. There are ways to address all of these problems, and simply throwing your hands up and saying "people suck," isn't going to cut it.
If by "complex, but not overly complex," you mean that there are numerous feedback loops in the brain that we still have no idea how they work at all, then yeah, sure, it's not complex at all.
There is funadmentally very little difference in the brain between hardware and software - chemicals cause changes in the brain's 'wiring,' and changes in the brain's 'wiring' cause different areas to behave differently with respect to the chemicals they respond to and produce, which can cause further 'hardware' and 'software' changes. You are drastically oversimplifying brain biology, or drastically underestimating the sheer numbers of moving parts involved in the brain's anatomy. As I said in another post - 256 bit encryption theoretically has a finite number of hashes; that doesn't mean we could practically hope to generate them all in any reasonable amount of time.
Each of the 100 billion or so neurons makes an average of several thousand connections with neighboring neurons. In any given neuron, any one (or multiple) of those synapses can be firing, with multiple possible neurotransmitters in an array of varying concentrations at any moment. We MIGHT be able to build a reasonably workable, if simplistic, model of a couple neurons. This is not anywhere close to being a brain.
We are nowhere near having the computing power (or the understanding of brain chemistry) to model hundreds of billions of neurons, each with thousands of synapses, all firing with & RESPONDING to various neurotransmitters, plus the feedback and regulatory loops that govern those neurons, plus the regions & structures inside the brain governing various functions and pathways... we are just scratching the surface.
Will we understand it someday? We'll surely get a lot closer than we are now. Will that day be 2020? Nope.
I think it's a pretty safe bet that circuits in TEN YEARS will look substantially similar to the way they look now - a little smaller, perhaps. Kurzweil has predicted TEN YEARS from now, we will have done it - not 200 years.
So:
1) we have to first understand the brain (haven't managed it in the 60+ years since DNA was first described);
2) we have to completely reinvent the computer circuit (again, 60+ years, and we're still working with transistors);
3) we have to somehow design & build a system that will simulate that extremely complex system, using our new understanding and the new circuitry we've developed.
And kurzweil is predicting it'll all happen by 2020. Does that sound even remotely likely to you?
Problem: this scenario you describe assumes that you can take a bunch of average students, and by somehow putting them together in parallel, you'll get the theory of relativity out of them.
Fuck that place, it was dead anyway. I've found a new place that's the real deal, not full of wannabe scene kids.
And I promise - you've never heard of it.