That's the difference between being pedantic and not making the joke and sacrificing accuracy for the sake of making an amusing statement, or, in other words, the difference between being funny and being a nerd.
Didn't I see that in between deaths on Call of Duty 2?;-) I think that would have been in Call of Duty 4. Video game loading screens are a great vector of education, because you have nothing to do while they're on than look at them. Actually, I like to think that a loading screen can last as long as it is interesting.
I lived in France from 95-98, and I used the minitel for everything from directory assistance (ie - electronic phone book) to buying train tickets.
Yeah, by 95-98, I'd imagine the Minitel probably seemed pretty lame compared to the WWW. But the Minitel was introduced in the early 1982, and compared to what the US had readily available then, it doesn't look so bad.
Actually in my own experience the Minitel was still a great tool during that time because back then even if you had an Internet connection it didn't necessarily worked too well (well, mainly on the lousy Macintosh I had) to the point I can even recall browsing the web on a Lynx-browser like service on the Minitel around 1998. And of course browsing for 15 minutes would cost my parents about 30 Francs, but that was still better than hardly anything on the computer. And actually people (my family include) would, back in the 1980s, order clothes "online" on it or look up the weather, bank account or find telephone numbers. Not to mention people who would spend all their money on "cybersex" services. Funny to have experienced this web before the web.
Everytime I see graphs with a moving average, be it in TFA or some stock market graph it makes me cringe. OK, the moving average isn't the best filtering out there, there's a whole range of finite impulse response filters that have a more desirable frequency response than a moving average (which is convolution a rectangle, which means its frequency response is essentially a sinc function, which means a shitload of ripples), but why on Earth don't they compensate for the delay induced by the convolution?
Why do they let it have half the rectangle's width in delay when they could just compensate it so that the curve wouldn't look offset compared to the original data. And most mind-blogglingly, why on Earth do the same sort of people add another curve that is the difference between the original data and the delayed moving average?? Why oh why? It's senseless, as if the moving average was compensated then you could call it a high-pass filter and directly look at the high frequency components of the original data without adding any parasite low frequency component which doesn't match to anything desirable.
MODS: please moderate 4D6963 as the troll that he is in this thread, as he admitted in the parent post. OMFG!! A TROLL!! ON SLASHDOT!! NOWAI!! Besides, nobody's modding here anymore, sucker. That article is like 4 days old.
That he's not a crackpot? An apology for calling jnana a fool for no other reason than you didn't bother reading the link he provided? Do you seriously have no social skills whatsoever?
Quote myself "So OK, I admit, that guy has done some arguably impressive stuff, which I didn't know about (only knew about the silly predictions)". I don't see what has to be added to that. Once again you wasted a few minutes of your life. And so am I, but I'm actually trying to stay up so that's cool.
yeah, so basically you're not adding anything to what I said, you're just highlighting that it may be possible which I already mentioned. Way to not make a point.
That's embarrassing. Up until I read this, I'd assumed you were about 15, based on the way you talk to people. You'd be doing yourself a favour if you tried to act a bit more maturely. You really do come off sounding like an angry adolescent.
Oh, a canned maturity insult. I guess you're resorting to that because you couldn't decently talk down about my achievements. Besides, maturity is for losers, you big stupid doo doo head! "Oh look at me I'm so mature because I act all serious and stuff". Sucker.
I predict that if we compared what you have actually made happen and what Kurzweil has made happen in his long career, we'd see that Kurzweil has done much more, and had done things of greater benefit to humanity, than have you.
I'm 22 you fool! If you want a fair comparison, compare what Kurzweil had achieved as of 1970. I have pioneered in the domain of sound spectrography and spectrogram synthesis, the fruits of which research (link in my sig) are used to synthesise old bird spectrograms found in old ornithology books to listen to them, store sound on paper, separate musical instruments in a way that couldn't be achieved before, lossless (under ideal conditions) transmission of (analog) images over the sound in a way that anyone could pick up (none of these 4 things are shown on my site but if you troll me enough I could show you examples), hand-drawn speech synthesis, creating new sound effects that were impossible before (like "interval stretching"), and I am as of now breaking the uncertainty principle as applied to spectrograms by inventing a new super-resolution technique that has the potential to picture every single feature of a sound (work in progress, but I've still got something for showing if you really have to ask).
So OK, I admit, that guy has done some arguably impressive stuff, which I didn't know about (only knew about the silly predictions), but don't you dare comparing him to 22-year old me;-).
I think thats where most people have it wrong. Strong AI is not an algorithm problem but rather a technical one. A human brain has trillions of neurons that much have a state calculated parallel in order to recognize patterns and send and receive responses from the central nervous system.
So, start with something simpler, you fool! How about an ant's brain with only 250,000 cells in it? I'm sure you could make a more general simple strong AI with even less simulated cells. Why is there no such AI yet despite the fact that we have now super-computers with tens of thousands of parellel cores with each about a billion transistors on them?
Are you saying we can send objects out of our solar system and split the atom, but we won't be able to ever in thousands of years to figure out how the human brain works?
How about this : "Are you saying we can send objects out of our solar system and split the atom, but we won't be able to ever in thousands of years to figure out how have CSI-like infinite zoom?"
Somethings are impossible, eventually they get proven possible, but not always. Until then we have no idea how this could be possible, even if we intuitively think it should be. And if you think it's as simple as accurately simulating a bunch of neurons to the atomic level then I'm waiting for your simulation of an ant's brain.
But yeah, I'm just really sick of people talking about Skynet-like bullshit when no one even knows how to make a most basic level strong AI. Strong AIs are as of now science fiction at best, period.
4D6963, why are you so fucking pessimistic? This isn't like the speed of light, where our current understanding of the laws of physics in our universe says it's likely impossible to exceed. We're talking about something that occurred in nature, in accordance with those laws. Isn't it conceivable, that there is the possibility that given enough time and evolution of our knowledge, that we would be able to replicate this?
Maybe it would require a biological component, maybe it would require pixie dust, we don't know. But to say it'll never happen is just plain stupid. You seem to be very adamant that this just won't ever happen. Maybe humans will die out before we can ever achieve it, but since it's happened in nature, there's no reason to say it can never be reproduced.
But I suppose throughout all of history there have been people who said we'd never fly, or go into space, or cure some diseases, and others.
Maybe we need people like you to motivate us to prove you wrong.
I say it will never happen because I cannot be proven wrong. That's the point I'm making, nobody can say that such algorithms are possible, and until then I can get away with shouting as loud as I like that this is impossible and that it will never happen.
But when you look closer at the problem, I think there's a very good reason why we should actually lose hope it will ever happen. An ant has about 250,000 brain cells. A human has about 10 billion. For the sake of comparison, a (consumer level) CPU had about 250,000 transistors around 1985. Nowadays, a consumer level CPU has about 0.5 billion CPUs, and this IBM Roadrunner would, if I'm not mistaken, have very roughly 10 trillion transistors.
Yet we do not have any strong AI vaguely similar to an ant as of now, despite what would may seem as way enough computing power to make even a non-real time ant AI. Yet we are not there, and we are not on our way there, nor are we even on our way to knowing how to get on our way there.
A journey of thousands of miles starts with a single step, yet we have no fucking clue what this step would be, and yet we have suckers like Kurzweil talking about "Hey in 20XX we'll have the human intelligence times 1,000". Strong AI falls in the same category as teleportation, wrap drives and time travel. Maybe one day eventually it will be somehow possible, but right now we have no fucking clue how so all the fanatics going "OMG TEH SIGNURALITY IS COMMIGN!!1" should just shut up, or even commit collective suicide like the pseudo-apocalyptic cult that they are.
Kurzwiel [sic] is a crackpot to me for his wacky predictions
Have you checked out how many of his past wacky predictions have already come true? He's been making such predictions for decades now and has a pretty good success rate.
OMG, he predicted the downfall of USSR, in a book that came out the next year! ZOMG genius, "he foresaw that cellular phones would grow in popularity while shrinking in size for the foreseeable future". I for one thought that by the year 2000 the very few cell phone owner would barely be able to carry them in the back of their pickup trucks! Who woulda thought! OMG, he predicted a number of other things that anyone else could have predicted just by extrapolating a relevant graph! OMG he also predicted the use of UAVs by the military, which they only had been using since WWI! Wow, so he made a number of predictions that were either obvious to any such industry insider or predictions which had already happened or just an extrapolation of trends! What a genius, what a visionary! Jules Verne sounds like an Amish when compared to him! Not to mention his predictions that didn't come true! Oh wait..
If you look at the rest of his predictions with a bit of critical sense, you may realise that they're either ridiculous, technologically feasible but off the mark, the kind you can predict with the calculator (like the steadily increasing power of computers), or downright non-sensical ("A $1,000 personal computer is 1,000 times more powerful than the human brain"? If by that they mean that that computer can calculate a cosine 1,000 times faster than a human, then welcome to 1950. My point being that that sort of quantification/comparison is silly and laughable).
On a side note, trying to predict the future is silly and loserly. Making the future happen (by innovating rather than trying to predict innovation) is much cooler.
Arguing that there may not be an algorithm for artificial intelligence is stupid.
You're the stupid one, learn to read, dumb ass. It's all about strong AI, not the weak AI we commonly refer to as AI. And no, your assumption that a strong AI algorithm can exist is baseless since if it could be proven it would be implementable. Because you can't argue that such a class of algorithms can exist if we don't even have a clue what a most basic strong AI algorithm could be like. And no, putting together a bunch of neural networks isn't a clue. I'm right until proven wrong even if it intuitively seems to you that I shall ultimately be proven wrong.
Hallelujah! People even on Slashdot seem to think that sparks of magic come out of "supercomputers". It just runs shit faster than your PC, the exact same type of shit, only faster. It's a bit disappointing that even supposedly educated people (at least in the realm of computer technology) are so easily impressed.
...computer power and strong AI are two very distinct problems. Computer power is all about scaling up power so you can do more in less time, that doesn't allow you to do anything new, only the same things except faster. Not really. Assuming that strong AI will require massive amounts of parallel computing (which it will if we model it after the human brain), we need supercomputers to test and write these algorithms. So one (computer power) is a prerequisite for the other (strong AI)
What does your comment add to what I already said? A single computer can still do anything any super computer can do, only maybe slower. Doesn't change the fact that we still can't make a bug-like strong AI, and yet we've got crackpots going around drivelling about human-like AI. The point is we have all the power needed to get started. You can wait until we get a computer with a million cores doing an exaflop each, that won't begin to make you create a functional bug brain that can learn how to do whatever a bug does on its own.
Has it occured to you to actually read Kurzwiel? Why do you think its positive to label someone a "crackpot" when he is looking into some possibilities for our evolution.
More on that: how in the hell are we to keep evolving if not through technology? We wont evolve "naturally", i think thats well established, not anymore. Our social system (for ALL of us) has not erm... evolved to be a good evolutive system that rewards the best.
The only way "up" is through a technologicall singularity. I dont think its inevitable though, i think its necessary, desirable.
Translation : His claims are not crackpottery because you think that what he says is our only way out. That's like saying that terraforming Mars is possible just because we have no other choice.
And we still evolve naturally, you may want to read about the recent genetic evolutions that made groups of population stop tolerating milk. Besides, what's the necessity of the evolution you're talking about?
Kurzwiel is a crackpot despite his good intentions, because his claims are baseless, speculative and fantaisistic.
I wasn't saying that. Yes raw power doesn't equate to random sentience popping out of thin air.
But if you can simulate a neuron, or a group of neurons, or a region of neurons...
Or, hey, trillions of neurons, then you can simulate the human brain if you have the neurons down right and organized in a correct manner. Which we are learning more about every day.
If computational power is increasing at a exponential rate, and shows that this will be possible in a number of years, then it seems like a reasonable assumption.
Yeah, because all of us non-brain scientists here on Slashdot know that the brain is just a bunch neurons connected together and nothing else.
May I highlight the recently discovered role of astrocytes in the brain?
That's nothing. I'm already running a port of Linux in my brain, and cross-compiling for it on a program I wrote called VMbrain, which is able to run the same code as my brain.
So, can you kill yourself by running `rm -rf/` or does it only turn you into a 'vegetable'? Oh and more importantly, when you want to communicate with another computing device, do you plug your 'cable' in or is it the other way around?
All things considered I don't think I want to hear the answer to this question.
It's nice to see progress is being made. It's scary how accurate Ray Kurzwiel's predictions seem to be,
he said that by early 2010 we'll have simulated a human brain. (he's a technological analyst and author of "The Singularity is Near").
Todays desktops are faster then the super computers of the 90's. I can't wait till I'm able to get a laptop smarter then me in every way (queue joke about how stupid I am), that'll be a cool time to live in. Seems it's only a matter of decades away. Probably 20 years.
OMG a super computer! It's so powerful it can probably pop up a consciousness of its own!
Sarcasm aside, computer power and strong AI are two very distinct problems. Computer power is all about scaling up power so you can do more in less time, that doesn't allow you to do anything new, only the same things except faster. Strong AI is all about algorithms, and nobody can tell if such algorithms exist. And anyone who talks about human-like strong AI is a crackpot (Kurzwiel is a crackpot to me for his wacky predictions), as we have yet to see a bug-like strong AI, and if it was just a problem of power we'd already have something working in that field.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the difference between being pedantic and not making the joke and sacrificing accuracy for the sake of making an amusing statement, or, in other words, the difference between being funny and being a nerd.
Yeah, by 95-98, I'd imagine the Minitel probably seemed pretty lame compared to the WWW. But the Minitel was introduced in the early 1982, and compared to what the US had readily available then, it doesn't look so bad.
Actually in my own experience the Minitel was still a great tool during that time because back then even if you had an Internet connection it didn't necessarily worked too well (well, mainly on the lousy Macintosh I had) to the point I can even recall browsing the web on a Lynx-browser like service on the Minitel around 1998. And of course browsing for 15 minutes would cost my parents about 30 Francs, but that was still better than hardly anything on the computer. And actually people (my family include) would, back in the 1980s, order clothes "online" on it or look up the weather, bank account or find telephone numbers. Not to mention people who would spend all their money on "cybersex" services. Funny to have experienced this web before the web.
Everytime I see graphs with a moving average, be it in TFA or some stock market graph it makes me cringe. OK, the moving average isn't the best filtering out there, there's a whole range of finite impulse response filters that have a more desirable frequency response than a moving average (which is convolution a rectangle, which means its frequency response is essentially a sinc function, which means a shitload of ripples), but why on Earth don't they compensate for the delay induced by the convolution?
Why do they let it have half the rectangle's width in delay when they could just compensate it so that the curve wouldn't look offset compared to the original data. And most mind-blogglingly, why on Earth do the same sort of people add another curve that is the difference between the original data and the delayed moving average?? Why oh why? It's senseless, as if the moving average was compensated then you could call it a high-pass filter and directly look at the high frequency components of the original data without adding any parasite low frequency component which doesn't match to anything desirable.
Someone enlighten me please.
I don't see what has to be added to that.
That he's not a crackpot? An apology for calling jnana a fool for no other reason than you didn't bother reading the link he provided? Do you seriously have no social skills whatsoever?
It's called trolling, fool!Quote myself "So OK, I admit, that guy has done some arguably impressive stuff, which I didn't know about (only knew about the silly predictions)". I don't see what has to be added to that. Once again you wasted a few minutes of your life. And so am I, but I'm actually trying to stay up so that's cool.
lol, you're an idiot and I rule lololol
Interesting. I didn't know about that.
yeah, so basically you're not adding anything to what I said, you're just highlighting that it may be possible which I already mentioned. Way to not make a point.
I'm 22 you fool!
That's embarrassing. Up until I read this, I'd assumed you were about 15, based on the way you talk to people. You'd be doing yourself a favour if you tried to act a bit more maturely. You really do come off sounding like an angry adolescent.
Oh, a canned maturity insult. I guess you're resorting to that because you couldn't decently talk down about my achievements. Besides, maturity is for losers, you big stupid doo doo head! "Oh look at me I'm so mature because I act all serious and stuff". Sucker.I predict that if we compared what you have actually made happen and what Kurzweil has made happen in his long career, we'd see that Kurzweil has done much more, and had done things of greater benefit to humanity, than have you.
I'm 22 you fool! If you want a fair comparison, compare what Kurzweil had achieved as of 1970. I have pioneered in the domain of sound spectrography and spectrogram synthesis, the fruits of which research (link in my sig) are used to synthesise old bird spectrograms found in old ornithology books to listen to them, store sound on paper, separate musical instruments in a way that couldn't be achieved before, lossless (under ideal conditions) transmission of (analog) images over the sound in a way that anyone could pick up (none of these 4 things are shown on my site but if you troll me enough I could show you examples), hand-drawn speech synthesis, creating new sound effects that were impossible before (like "interval stretching"), and I am as of now breaking the uncertainty principle as applied to spectrograms by inventing a new super-resolution technique that has the potential to picture every single feature of a sound (work in progress, but I've still got something for showing if you really have to ask).
So OK, I admit, that guy has done some arguably impressive stuff, which I didn't know about (only knew about the silly predictions), but don't you dare comparing him to 22-year old me ;-).
I think thats where most people have it wrong. Strong AI is not an algorithm problem but rather a technical one. A human brain has trillions of neurons that much have a state calculated parallel in order to recognize patterns and send and receive responses from the central nervous system.
So, start with something simpler, you fool! How about an ant's brain with only 250,000 cells in it? I'm sure you could make a more general simple strong AI with even less simulated cells. Why is there no such AI yet despite the fact that we have now super-computers with tens of thousands of parellel cores with each about a billion transistors on them?
Are you saying we can send objects out of our solar system and split the atom, but we won't be able to ever in thousands of years to figure out how the human brain works?
How about this : "Are you saying we can send objects out of our solar system and split the atom, but we won't be able to ever in thousands of years to figure out how have CSI-like infinite zoom?"
Somethings are impossible, eventually they get proven possible, but not always. Until then we have no idea how this could be possible, even if we intuitively think it should be. And if you think it's as simple as accurately simulating a bunch of neurons to the atomic level then I'm waiting for your simulation of an ant's brain.
But yeah, I'm just really sick of people talking about Skynet-like bullshit when no one even knows how to make a most basic level strong AI. Strong AIs are as of now science fiction at best, period.
I say it will never happen because I cannot be proven wrong. That's the point I'm making, nobody can say that such algorithms are possible, and until then I can get away with shouting as loud as I like that this is impossible and that it will never happen.
But when you look closer at the problem, I think there's a very good reason why we should actually lose hope it will ever happen. An ant has about 250,000 brain cells. A human has about 10 billion. For the sake of comparison, a (consumer level) CPU had about 250,000 transistors around 1985. Nowadays, a consumer level CPU has about 0.5 billion CPUs, and this IBM Roadrunner would, if I'm not mistaken, have very roughly 10 trillion transistors.
Yet we do not have any strong AI vaguely similar to an ant as of now, despite what would may seem as way enough computing power to make even a non-real time ant AI. Yet we are not there, and we are not on our way there, nor are we even on our way to knowing how to get on our way there.
A journey of thousands of miles starts with a single step, yet we have no fucking clue what this step would be, and yet we have suckers like Kurzweil talking about "Hey in 20XX we'll have the human intelligence times 1,000". Strong AI falls in the same category as teleportation, wrap drives and time travel. Maybe one day eventually it will be somehow possible, but right now we have no fucking clue how so all the fanatics going "OMG TEH SIGNURALITY IS COMMIGN!!1" should just shut up, or even commit collective suicide like the pseudo-apocalyptic cult that they are.
Kurzwiel [sic] is a crackpot to me for his wacky predictions
Have you checked out how many of his past wacky predictions have already come true? He's been making such predictions for decades now and has a pretty good success rate.
OMG, he predicted the downfall of USSR, in a book that came out the next year! ZOMG genius, "he foresaw that cellular phones would grow in popularity while shrinking in size for the foreseeable future". I for one thought that by the year 2000 the very few cell phone owner would barely be able to carry them in the back of their pickup trucks! Who woulda thought! OMG, he predicted a number of other things that anyone else could have predicted just by extrapolating a relevant graph! OMG he also predicted the use of UAVs by the military, which they only had been using since WWI! Wow, so he made a number of predictions that were either obvious to any such industry insider or predictions which had already happened or just an extrapolation of trends! What a genius, what a visionary! Jules Verne sounds like an Amish when compared to him! Not to mention his predictions that didn't come true! Oh wait..If you look at the rest of his predictions with a bit of critical sense, you may realise that they're either ridiculous, technologically feasible but off the mark, the kind you can predict with the calculator (like the steadily increasing power of computers), or downright non-sensical ("A $1,000 personal computer is 1,000 times more powerful than the human brain"? If by that they mean that that computer can calculate a cosine 1,000 times faster than a human, then welcome to 1950. My point being that that sort of quantification/comparison is silly and laughable).
On a side note, trying to predict the future is silly and loserly. Making the future happen (by innovating rather than trying to predict innovation) is much cooler.
Arguing that there may not be an algorithm for artificial intelligence is stupid.
You're the stupid one, learn to read, dumb ass. It's all about strong AI, not the weak AI we commonly refer to as AI. And no, your assumption that a strong AI algorithm can exist is baseless since if it could be proven it would be implementable. Because you can't argue that such a class of algorithms can exist if we don't even have a clue what a most basic strong AI algorithm could be like. And no, putting together a bunch of neural networks isn't a clue. I'm right until proven wrong even if it intuitively seems to you that I shall ultimately be proven wrong.Hallelujah! People even on Slashdot seem to think that sparks of magic come out of "supercomputers". It just runs shit faster than your PC, the exact same type of shit, only faster. It's a bit disappointing that even supposedly educated people (at least in the realm of computer technology) are so easily impressed.
...computer power and strong AI are two very distinct problems. Computer power is all about scaling up power so you can do more in less time, that doesn't allow you to do anything new, only the same things except faster. Not really. Assuming that strong AI will require massive amounts of parallel computing (which it will if we model it after the human brain), we need supercomputers to test and write these algorithms. So one (computer power) is a prerequisite for the other (strong AI)What does your comment add to what I already said? A single computer can still do anything any super computer can do, only maybe slower. Doesn't change the fact that we still can't make a bug-like strong AI, and yet we've got crackpots going around drivelling about human-like AI. The point is we have all the power needed to get started. You can wait until we get a computer with a million cores doing an exaflop each, that won't begin to make you create a functional bug brain that can learn how to do whatever a bug does on its own.
More on that: how in the hell are we to keep evolving if not through technology? We wont evolve "naturally", i think thats well established, not anymore. Our social system (for ALL of us) has not erm... evolved to be a good evolutive system that rewards the best.
The only way "up" is through a technologicall singularity. I dont think its inevitable though, i think its necessary, desirable.
Translation : His claims are not crackpottery because you think that what he says is our only way out. That's like saying that terraforming Mars is possible just because we have no other choice.
And we still evolve naturally, you may want to read about the recent genetic evolutions that made groups of population stop tolerating milk. Besides, what's the necessity of the evolution you're talking about?
Kurzwiel is a crackpot despite his good intentions, because his claims are baseless, speculative and fantaisistic.
Yeah, because all of us non-brain scientists here on Slashdot know that the brain is just a bunch neurons connected together and nothing else.
May I highlight the recently discovered role of astrocytes in the brain?
There are around six billion instances of such algorithms in production today. We know they exist.
I've got some news for you, the A in 'AI' stands for 'Artificial'.
Burn.
So, can you kill yourself by running `rm -rf /` or does it only turn you into a 'vegetable'? Oh and more importantly, when you want to communicate with another computing device, do you plug your 'cable' in or is it the other way around?
All things considered I don't think I want to hear the answer to this question.
OMG a super computer! It's so powerful it can probably pop up a consciousness of its own!
Sarcasm aside, computer power and strong AI are two very distinct problems. Computer power is all about scaling up power so you can do more in less time, that doesn't allow you to do anything new, only the same things except faster. Strong AI is all about algorithms, and nobody can tell if such algorithms exist. And anyone who talks about human-like strong AI is a crackpot (Kurzwiel is a crackpot to me for his wacky predictions), as we have yet to see a bug-like strong AI, and if it was just a problem of power we'd already have something working in that field.