That's a pretty low bar. So to pass the test a computer needs three very low IQ subjects and seven normal people? Hell, the Alice program would probably pass. How about a more reasonable percentage, like 95%?
Do you feel that the brain is more than just a electrochemical analog computer, running a simulation of the world in your head using some pretty weak inputs?
No, it is analog but more than a computer. A computer is nothing more than an abacus with electrons for beads and billions of wires (one bead per wire rather than nine since it's binary); given enough time an abacus could come up with the exact same answer as Watson.
How many beads and wires does it take for an abacus to become sentient? Because when you're talking about a Von Neuman computer architecture you're talking about an electric abacus.
Will we ever build a sentient something? I think probably, but it won't be an abacus like today's computers are.
Maybe for a city kid, but I've ridden horses and grown gardens before. Except that you load it differently and only have one shot, I'm pretty sure I could hit a rabbit with a musket, I hunted when I was a kid. OTOH someone from Franklin's time would be utterly lost trying to use a phone, microwave, car, even a TV. And what could anyone from that time do for a living?
If you went to his time it wouldn't be that unfamiliar; you've seen westerns and read history books. Our culture and technology would be completely alien to them in every way. Hell, I doubt Franklin could stay out of jail in today's world.
I read those articles, and those guys are talking outside their fields without realizing it. One is an astronomer and one an astrophysicist, so they're leaving out an important part of the equation: biology. How hard is it for life to start in the first place? We simply don't know. We've never seen it happen.
Our galaxy could be teeming with life, maybe teeming with intelligent life, life could be very rare, occurring in one in a hundred galaxies, and it's even possible that we are indeed alone, or the first. There is yet no possible way to know.
Bad analogy; you don't use your stomach to understand something. I think you don't really understand the concept of the quote. IOW you can't simulate your computer on your computer, it isn't big enough. You need a bigger computer to simulate yours, or simulate a smaller computer with yours.
That said, I don't agree with Stewart. I think we are smart enough to figure it out.
Yes, we'll most likely finally understand the chemistry and biology of how the brain works, and build Blade Runner-like "replicants", but you can't build a hamburger with circuity; sentience is a chemical process.
Just because it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck doesn't make it a duck no matter what some stupid politician says. A simulation of an atom bomb blast produces no destruction nor radiation, and a simulation of a brain will only simulate thought.
Wikipedia disagrees with you, and neither the OED or Webster's defines "technological singularity".
The technological singularity, or simply the singularity, is a hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence will have progressed to the point of a greater-than-human intelligence, radically changing civilization, and perhaps human nature.[1] Because the capabilities of such an intelligence may be difficult for a human to comprehend, the technological singularity is often seen as an occurrence (akin to a gravitational singularity) beyond which the future course of human history is unpredictable or even unfathomable.[2]
Technology has always displaced human labor. As to Wikipedia's definition, which is what this thread is about, as someone who knows how computers work, down to the schematics of the gates inside your processor (read The TTL Handbook some time) and has programmed in hand-assembled machine code and written a program on a Z-80 computer and 16k of RAM that fooled people into believing it was actually sentient, I'm calling bullshit on the first part of the definition (first put forward in 1958 by Von Neuman when my Sinclair had more power than the computers of his day).
As to the second part, it's already happened. The world today is nothing like the world was in 1964. Both civilization and "human nature" (read this) have changed radically in the last fifty years. Doubtless it changed as much in the 1st half of the 20th century, and someone from Jefferson's time would be completely lost in today's world.
The due respect this concept commands, in my humble opinion, is no more than the simple recognition of its place in the history and lore of our beloved internet community that you demonstrated adequately in your first paragraph.
As does my pen name. It honors the history, but the concept, again, was like hula hoops and ma jong: a meaningless fad.
To put it in terms an average person such as yourself
I'm anything but average. As to a review, I'd love to see a negative critique.
Everyone is different and grow and mature and age at different rates, but the trouble with pot and teenagers is that the teenaged brain is not yet fully formed.
As to a citation for "no such placebo", it would be like a placebo to study drunkenness. One feels the effects of mind-altering substances. Rather, they do statistical studies comparing users with non-users.
From personal experience, drinking while programming isn't so bad, although the increasing mental and physical clumsiness will eventually become a problem. Smoking weed while programming, on the other hand, is asking for trouble.
That was the opposite of my experience back when I was programming. Two beers and I couldn't program my way out of a paper bag, but being high was actually beneficial, so long as I didn't get zombified.
Smart people don't use themselves as guinea pigs on an unstudied drug which may or may not have long term negative affects on memory.
True, smart people read everything they could about the subject first.
Anecdotal experience seems to support...
Anecdotes are not data and have little value.
As far as the late 70s to early 80s I have to agree with the observation of potheads and geeks not mixing and that geeks who spent most of their time either playing computer games or Dungeons and Dragons or writing computer games generally did not smoke pot.
I turned $10 transistor radios into $250 guitar fuzzboxes for my stoner musician friends as a teenager, although I never smoked it myself until I was 20.
If you're worried about memory loss, stay away from all alcohol use.
Until it has been proven to be safe through long term placebo controlled studies I would hope that most intelligent people would give it a wide berth.
Placebo? LOL! There is no such placebo. However, millions of people have used it long-term with no ill effects so no such study is needed. Studies have been done, statistical studies looking at pot smokers vs nonsmokers show that smoking it (actually smoking anything) long-term is bad for your lungs, but doesn't cause cancer and actually helps prevent it in cigarette smokers.
Studies have shown, however, that smoking pot before adulthood can indeed have a negative affect on the brain, so young folks ought to stay away from it.
After all, you don't even know why it was prohibited.
And how could you know that he doesn't know? Historians have written hundreds of books on the subject. It appears that your knowledge of 20th century American history is weak; you might start by reading up on this guy. He was the assistant prohibition commissioner in the Bureau of Prohibition, before being appointed as the first commissioner of the U.S. Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) on August 12, 1930.
He was the one behind marijuana prohibition. Books I read (granted, four decades ago) stated that there was an either real or perceived heroin problem, and since Congress wouldn't cough up more cash for his fight against heroin, so he made up the marijuana menace out of whole cloth so he could divert funds appropriated for marijuana prohibition to fighting heroin use.
At the time, about the only people who used marijuana during the '30s were blacks, Mexicans, musicians, writers, and artists, all of whom were irrelevant in politics at the time. Watch Reefer Madness, an anti "muggles" (slang for marijuana at the time) propaganda film. It's actually funny, especially if you're stoned.
One or two books I read had the Hearst family's fortune tied up in industries that competed with hemp: cotton, paper, plastics (rope), etc, but those books had no citations so were a bit suspect.
Now, here's a bit of history I lived through. I don't think I even heard of marijuana until the sixties when I was a teenager. What happened was white kids started coming back from Vietnam, where the black guys introduced the white guys to that killer Asian bud, and once home it quickly spread to other young whites.
And the anti-pot hysteria continues, despite any proof whatever that marijuana isn't the least dangerous of all psychoactive substances and even safer than many over the counter medications, such as aspirin or Tylenol (acetaminophen), the former of which can cause stomach and intestinal ulcers, the second of which can damage your liver.
The newspapers have been reporting on two people having psychotic episodes after eating huge amounts of pot, without noting that crazy people use pot, too, and one of the two had other psychoactive drugs in his system.
There was a fellow I was stationed with in the USAF who merely thought he'd been given LSD, and that was enough to trigger a psychotic episode. Crazy people are crazy, drugs or no drugs.
omission of capitalization is a hallmark of early internet adepts (primarily 'murican, of course) who cut their teeth on BBSs, usenet newsgroups, IRC channels, MUDs, etc...
I can attest to that, having first gone online with a 300 baud modem in 1982. Back then, a lot of smaller computers and some mainframes had no lower case letters (my first two computers had no lower case), so the technical people got used to ignoring the shift key while office workers had IBM-PCs and Wang... uh, I forgot what they were called; it was a minicomputer that was kind of dedicated word processor with multiple terminals the secretaries typed on.
you'd do well for your johnny-come-lately national presence on the internet to raise your awareness of and respect that.
You'd do well to respect the properly written word so as to avoid looking like a juvenile and to make what you write more readable. As to respecting writing that uses no capitals, it's like respecting bird shit on your windshield. It was a stupid fad that lasted way past its time and deserves no respect whatever.
I won't be buying anything marked LG for quite some time; I had one of their phones about ten years ago. Buggiest piece of shit I ever saw, made Windows 95 look good by comparison. The screen would often turn upside down, backwards, all white, all black, do all sorts of strange things. Thinking "factory defect" I sent it back, and the replacement was even worse. So I'm going to have to have a whole lot of people I trust telling me how well built their LG is before I buy anything from them. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
As to their privacy policy, it's pretty obvious they stupidly and arrogantly hold their customers in contempt.
That said, I don't want a "smart TV" at all. I'll stick with my old kubuntu computer I have plugged into my old TV's S-Video and the stereo with the big speakers, and when the TV finally dies I'll try to find one without a built-in computer, just because it makes vile shit like this possible.
Faster than my first two computers, too, but neither of them weighed thirteen tons! Also, storage access would have been a much bigger problem than clock speed, seeing as how they used mercury switches to store bits.
...Those circumstances set the stage for the election night dramatics of the Univac â" perhaps the most significant live TV performance ever by a computer. It might just be technology's equivalent of the first Elvis appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Except parents didn't worry that computers were going to destroy the moral fiber of the nation's youth, which shows you how much parents know.
In a few hours on Nov. 4, 1952, Univac altered politics, changed the world's perception of computers and upended the tech industry's status quo. Along the way, it embarrassed CBS long before Dan Rather could do that all by himself...
It also mentions that a musical Hallmark card has more computing power than Univac did.
Why could you not frack with saltwater? Of course you'll use fresh water in the middle of the continent. Would the salt contaminate aquifers or something?
Do you know where California is and what desalination is? You don't desalinate fresh water. California has well over a thousand miles of ocean coastline.
Indeed, the answer to his question is "because people are stupid." I have no contract, unlimited everything, and pay $40 per month. I'm not going to shill them, there are plenty of them so names aren't necessary. My daughter was paying three times that on AT&T and switched to the one I have (and an Android like mine) when her iPhone broke.
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That's a pretty low bar. So to pass the test a computer needs three very low IQ subjects and seven normal people? Hell, the Alice program would probably pass. How about a more reasonable percentage, like 95%?
A Turing machine is an abacus. Have a look at schematics of chips some time.
Do you feel that the brain is more than just a electrochemical analog computer, running a simulation of the world in your head using some pretty weak inputs?
No, it is analog but more than a computer. A computer is nothing more than an abacus with electrons for beads and billions of wires (one bead per wire rather than nine since it's binary); given enough time an abacus could come up with the exact same answer as Watson.
How many beads and wires does it take for an abacus to become sentient? Because when you're talking about a Von Neuman computer architecture you're talking about an electric abacus.
Will we ever build a sentient something? I think probably, but it won't be an abacus like today's computers are.
Impossible today, but give it a few hundred years.
Maybe for a city kid, but I've ridden horses and grown gardens before. Except that you load it differently and only have one shot, I'm pretty sure I could hit a rabbit with a musket, I hunted when I was a kid. OTOH someone from Franklin's time would be utterly lost trying to use a phone, microwave, car, even a TV. And what could anyone from that time do for a living?
If you went to his time it wouldn't be that unfamiliar; you've seen westerns and read history books. Our culture and technology would be completely alien to them in every way. Hell, I doubt Franklin could stay out of jail in today's world.
The closest to a real sci-fi matching possibility. would be a generational ship where the ship will take thousands of years to get to its destination
I used to think that until I saw this.
You didn't think your thoughts were based on fairy-dust, did you?
No, they're based on chemistry. Which, I guess, is fairy dust to some. But it's certainly not based on electricity.
First Contact will happen by 2024;
I read those articles, and those guys are talking outside their fields without realizing it. One is an astronomer and one an astrophysicist, so they're leaving out an important part of the equation: biology. How hard is it for life to start in the first place? We simply don't know. We've never seen it happen.
Our galaxy could be teeming with life, maybe teeming with intelligent life, life could be very rare, occurring in one in a hundred galaxies, and it's even possible that we are indeed alone, or the first. There is yet no possible way to know.
Bad analogy; you don't use your stomach to understand something. I think you don't really understand the concept of the quote. IOW you can't simulate your computer on your computer, it isn't big enough. You need a bigger computer to simulate yours, or simulate a smaller computer with yours.
That said, I don't agree with Stewart. I think we are smart enough to figure it out.
Yes, we'll most likely finally understand the chemistry and biology of how the brain works, and build Blade Runner-like "replicants", but you can't build a hamburger with circuity; sentience is a chemical process.
Just because it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck doesn't make it a duck no matter what some stupid politician says. A simulation of an atom bomb blast produces no destruction nor radiation, and a simulation of a brain will only simulate thought.
Wikipedia disagrees with you, and neither the OED or Webster's defines "technological singularity".
Technology has always displaced human labor. As to Wikipedia's definition, which is what this thread is about, as someone who knows how computers work, down to the schematics of the gates inside your processor (read The TTL Handbook some time) and has programmed in hand-assembled machine code and written a program on a Z-80 computer and 16k of RAM that fooled people into believing it was actually sentient, I'm calling bullshit on the first part of the definition (first put forward in 1958 by Von Neuman when my Sinclair had more power than the computers of his day).
As to the second part, it's already happened. The world today is nothing like the world was in 1964. Both civilization and "human nature" (read this) have changed radically in the last fifty years. Doubtless it changed as much in the 1st half of the 20th century, and someone from Jefferson's time would be completely lost in today's world.
It certainly made sense playing Quake, I'll agree.
The due respect this concept commands, in my humble opinion, is no more than the simple recognition of its place in the history and lore of our beloved internet community that you demonstrated adequately in your first paragraph.
As does my pen name. It honors the history, but the concept, again, was like hula hoops and ma jong: a meaningless fad.
To put it in terms an average person such as yourself
I'm anything but average. As to a review, I'd love to see a negative critique.
Define 'adulthood'.
Everyone is different and grow and mature and age at different rates, but the trouble with pot and teenagers is that the teenaged brain is not yet fully formed.
As to a citation for "no such placebo", it would be like a placebo to study drunkenness. One feels the effects of mind-altering substances. Rather, they do statistical studies comparing users with non-users.
From personal experience, drinking while programming isn't so bad, although the increasing mental and physical clumsiness will eventually become a problem. Smoking weed while programming, on the other hand, is asking for trouble.
That was the opposite of my experience back when I was programming. Two beers and I couldn't program my way out of a paper bag, but being high was actually beneficial, so long as I didn't get zombified.
Smart people don't use themselves as guinea pigs on an unstudied drug which may or may not have long term negative affects on memory.
True, smart people read everything they could about the subject first.
Anecdotal experience seems to support...
Anecdotes are not data and have little value.
As far as the late 70s to early 80s I have to agree with the observation of potheads and geeks not mixing and that geeks who spent most of their time either playing computer games or Dungeons and Dragons or writing computer games generally did not smoke pot.
I turned $10 transistor radios into $250 guitar fuzzboxes for my stoner musician friends as a teenager, although I never smoked it myself until I was 20.
If you're worried about memory loss, stay away from all alcohol use.
Until it has been proven to be safe through long term placebo controlled studies I would hope that most intelligent people would give it a wide berth.
Placebo? LOL! There is no such placebo. However, millions of people have used it long-term with no ill effects so no such study is needed. Studies have been done, statistical studies looking at pot smokers vs nonsmokers show that smoking it (actually smoking anything) long-term is bad for your lungs, but doesn't cause cancer and actually helps prevent it in cigarette smokers.
Studies have shown, however, that smoking pot before adulthood can indeed have a negative affect on the brain, so young folks ought to stay away from it.
After all, you don't even know why it was prohibited.
And how could you know that he doesn't know? Historians have written hundreds of books on the subject. It appears that your knowledge of 20th century American history is weak; you might start by reading up on this guy. He was the assistant prohibition commissioner in the Bureau of Prohibition, before being appointed as the first commissioner of the U.S. Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) on August 12, 1930.
He was the one behind marijuana prohibition. Books I read (granted, four decades ago) stated that there was an either real or perceived heroin problem, and since Congress wouldn't cough up more cash for his fight against heroin, so he made up the marijuana menace out of whole cloth so he could divert funds appropriated for marijuana prohibition to fighting heroin use.
At the time, about the only people who used marijuana during the '30s were blacks, Mexicans, musicians, writers, and artists, all of whom were irrelevant in politics at the time. Watch Reefer Madness, an anti "muggles" (slang for marijuana at the time) propaganda film. It's actually funny, especially if you're stoned.
One or two books I read had the Hearst family's fortune tied up in industries that competed with hemp: cotton, paper, plastics (rope), etc, but those books had no citations so were a bit suspect.
Now, here's a bit of history I lived through. I don't think I even heard of marijuana until the sixties when I was a teenager. What happened was white kids started coming back from Vietnam, where the black guys introduced the white guys to that killer Asian bud, and once home it quickly spread to other young whites.
And the anti-pot hysteria continues, despite any proof whatever that marijuana isn't the least dangerous of all psychoactive substances and even safer than many over the counter medications, such as aspirin or Tylenol (acetaminophen), the former of which can cause stomach and intestinal ulcers, the second of which can damage your liver.
The newspapers have been reporting on two people having psychotic episodes after eating huge amounts of pot, without noting that crazy people use pot, too, and one of the two had other psychoactive drugs in his system.
There was a fellow I was stationed with in the USAF who merely thought he'd been given LSD, and that was enough to trigger a psychotic episode. Crazy people are crazy, drugs or no drugs.
omission of capitalization is a hallmark of early internet adepts (primarily 'murican, of course) who cut their teeth on BBSs, usenet newsgroups, IRC channels, MUDs, etc...
I can attest to that, having first gone online with a 300 baud modem in 1982. Back then, a lot of smaller computers and some mainframes had no lower case letters (my first two computers had no lower case), so the technical people got used to ignoring the shift key while office workers had IBM-PCs and Wang... uh, I forgot what they were called; it was a minicomputer that was kind of dedicated word processor with multiple terminals the secretaries typed on.
you'd do well for your johnny-come-lately national presence on the internet to raise your awareness of and respect that.
You'd do well to respect the properly written word so as to avoid looking like a juvenile and to make what you write more readable. As to respecting writing that uses no capitals, it's like respecting bird shit on your windshield. It was a stupid fad that lasted way past its time and deserves no respect whatever.
For a SEC? What does the Securities and Exchange Commission have to do with it?
I won't be buying anything marked LG for quite some time; I had one of their phones about ten years ago. Buggiest piece of shit I ever saw, made Windows 95 look good by comparison. The screen would often turn upside down, backwards, all white, all black, do all sorts of strange things. Thinking "factory defect" I sent it back, and the replacement was even worse. So I'm going to have to have a whole lot of people I trust telling me how well built their LG is before I buy anything from them. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
As to their privacy policy, it's pretty obvious they stupidly and arrogantly hold their customers in contempt.
That said, I don't want a "smart TV" at all. I'll stick with my old kubuntu computer I have plugged into my old TV's S-Video and the stereo with the big speakers, and when the TV finally dies I'll try to find one without a built-in computer, just because it makes vile shit like this possible.
Faster than my first two computers, too, but neither of them weighed thirteen tons! Also, storage access would have been a much bigger problem than clock speed, seeing as how they used mercury switches to store bits.
I found this article about Univac fascinating, an account of Univac vs. humans.
It also mentions that a musical Hallmark card has more computing power than Univac did.
Why could you not frack with saltwater? Of course you'll use fresh water in the middle of the continent. Would the salt contaminate aquifers or something?
Do you know where California is and what desalination is? You don't desalinate fresh water. California has well over a thousand miles of ocean coastline.
That's the biggest reason I stopped gaming -- ALL the game companies turned into customer-hating monsters. Fuck all of them.
Indeed, the answer to his question is "because people are stupid." I have no contract, unlimited everything, and pay $40 per month. I'm not going to shill them, there are plenty of them so names aren't necessary. My daughter was paying three times that on AT&T and switched to the one I have (and an Android like mine) when her iPhone broke.