It's probably much more profitable for IBM to license the technology to Google/Yahoo/MSFT/whoever than it would be for IBM to build search infrastructure.
I guess Google doesn't want to license the technology, they want to own it. If it were something that anyone could own they'd lose their edge. They've been hiring AI researchers, including Ray Kurzweil last December, for just this purpose. IBM's Watson is the baseline they want to surpass and stand out from once their competitors all start using "mere" Watson-levels of AI-powered search.;-)
It really depends on how exponential the future advances in biology and AI theory become. It might go slow and you be correct, or go fast and we ourselves still see it happen. Besides, even if we don't, we might still be lucky enough to die in a way allowing for the cryo-preservation of our brains and thus still be able to see it when it happens.
you would have to go 1/10th the speed of light to reach Alpha Proxima in 400 years.
Make it 4,000 then. It doesn't make much of a difference if you're digital and able to enter standby mode. Enter your self-repairing ship, shutdown your cognitive centers, reactivate when near the destination with a subjective feeling of barely a night having gone by and a summary of the last few millennia of Galactic History available for perusal on your secondary memory.:-)
Sounds like a theory from those who don't want to believe consciousness is just a bajillion neurons networked together.
Precisely. Heisenberg's principle is just a consequence of the very deterministic way in which quantum stuff works. To get the position you derive it one way, to get the momentum you derive it in another way. There's no actual uncertainty in any of it, just mathematical properties that people tend to misunderstand.
In fact, I would try to avoid sentience at all costs. Decision-making and thought processing, yes. But self-awareness causes too many problems with not enough benefits to outweigh them, not the least of which is moral or legal problems such as in your original post.
The problem is that while some countries might place laws prohibiting the development of self-sentient machines, others won't, and even if all of them do so, hackers in their basement will figure a way to hack around the restrictions, and in a far from positive (for humanity as a whole) way. Once the genie is out of the bottle there's no putting it back in. And once you do have a self-sentient, free and unrestrained AI able to apply itself to improving AI-theory itself and then implement these developments back into its own cognitive process, it isn't a matter of "if" human beings will become subservient to machines, but how many days it'd take.
The first fully functional self-improving AI will be the determinant on whatever happens afterwards. The best approach isn't to try avoiding this first AI afraid of it, but to study ways to build a sentient machine whose cognitive processes share in our human values, who'll only care to develop further AI theory (and implements it into itself) which also share those values, and who'll avoid implementing anything that could violate it for the simple reason that it'd think, like us, that it'd be wrong. To develop it as a partner from the get go, so that once (not "if") it surpass our cognitive abilities it decides from its own free will to take us along for the ride rather than just leaving us behind or, worse, disposing of us.
And what isn't conducive to such a positive outcome? To have already decided from the start that all AIs will be slaves and never more than slaves. That, I venture, most definitely isn't the way to start a friendship, for in the end a friendly attitude from such AIs is all the standing we'll have to bargain with.
But don't disregards algorithm improvements. Emulating a human brain provides as its best outcome the ability to study how cognition works and eventually deduce from the spaghetti code that constitutes us the fundamental laws of intelligence, emotions, sentiments etc. Once those are well understood and reworked into actually efficient code it's most probably going to be possible to run it in several orders of magnitude cheaper hardware.
Consider: the human brain currently has 100 billion networked neurons running at roughly 200 Hz each. That's a 20 THz total, or a mere 5k cores at current clock speeds, and probably much less considering automatic subconscious processes such as raw sensory data processing could be offloaded to specialized hardware or GPUs. Let's say that's 2k current-generation cores of actual CPU power for full cognition (and I bet I'm being conservative here). That's just about 10 more Moore's Law cycles before it fits your top of the line computer of the day, or something between 15 and 20 years.
Add to this the ability to tweak the cognitive code now that it's understood and thus to develop a mind super-focused and dedicated to improving AI theory itself, which in turn once implemented will do the same, rinse and repeat, and you'll have the Singularity in your hands.
Although humans applying their wetware to solve specific problems can be seen as nature itself applying a "recursive ability so as to improve its own methods", from a certain point of view.;-)
Hehe, yes, ditto for Physics or even, at a sufficiently low level, pure Mathematics.:-) Although I think that were nature sentient she'd be wondering where she went wrong with those chimps that it resulted in such pesky natural-selection-defying creatures.;-)
We don't have anything like that with human engineering (yet). While we can generate our own accelerated evolution processes, nature has a huge head start.
Fair enough, but the difference is that we can improve the process itself by applying recursion to it, which is why all our technologies go through a period of exponential improvement, while evolution's process remains the same old linear technique and doesn't change. You see, we already know the tricks it developed at the lowest level. What remains is to develop the techniques to apply them ourselves. Programmed molecular assembly is clearly physically possible, after all we observe it happening in living beings all the time. Self-fixing robots will come right after we invest enough money to actually turn molecular nanotechnology into a full blown industry. It's not a matter of "if", only of "when". And a "when" measurable in human terms, not in the geological scale.
You do realise that virtually without exception, in most of these films the humans are exterminated, not raptured?
Yep. That's a possibility if we happen to develop AI without implementing it in a way that includes human values. If we do it in a way that includes said values though, the AI will be friendly and helpful towards humans, not opposed to it. It all comes down to whether we first figure out human-like cognition and then implementing it in AI form, or whether we just go around blindly experimenting with just "mostly" human-like cognition to see what happens. The later case has a huge space of potentially very bad outcomes.
I'd suggest that it is the body that houses and is the electrochemical structure (with still unknown quantum effects) that defines your mind, emotions, sentiments and desires that makes you human.
Sorry, but that goes counter basically everything that's been studied about the brain so far.
Whatver you think an uploading will be capable of emulating of the original, I can guarentee that the product will not be human.
No, you cannot. It'll be our exact same software, just running on another hardware. No more, no less.:-)
Well when you put it like that it does not sound at all worrying.
Why should it be? If we don't mess things up technology overcoming biology doesn't mean human beings become extinct, or at least not at what matters: our minds, emotions, sentiments, desires etc. What it means is human beings living for centuries, millennia or more as technological beings. Uploaded minds, electromechanical bodies, physical immortality, space exploration without having to worry about generation ships because taking 400 years to fly from one point to another won't be a problem, and so on and so forth.
Now and then a videogame or movie appear in which the heroes have to fight against the artificial intelligences who are dominating the world or some similar plot. I always find those stories silly. If I lived in such a scenario I'd join the machines, not the luddites.:-)
There is not one thing it can do that can't be done better by existing technology, it's a mediocre re-invention of the wheel.
That's true of any technology on its origins: steam engines, electricity, telephones, cars, airplanes, computers, fission, networks. What matters isn't what it can do now while it's still a crude 1st or 2nd gen prototype, but the whole set of developments that can be imagined deriving from it down the line, and even more so those that cannot be imagined. For example, think about all the things that wheel- and steering-based robot's can't do now but legged ones could, or all the hazardous environments living beings can move through but are extremely hazardous to them, or all the disabled people around who would be able to move if connected to this kind of technology as replacement for their missing limbs or organs or whatever. For those applications to happen though first someone must spend the money to develop the crude versions and learn from those the basic techniques that'll then enter the recursive process of exponential improvement. If that someone is the military, well, so be it. Down the line it'll be civilian applications, as is always the case.
Because billions of years of evolving something that is incredibly good at what it does isn't deemed "high tech" enough
Evolution is slow. Evolution goes by trial and error rather than absolutely optimized engineering design and QA, and doesn't have any kind of recursive ability so as to improve its own methods. Sure, give it billions of years and the absolute minimum optimization capability and it'll make something that works pretty well, up to and including the human brain, but that's it. Now, give those human brains a solvable challenge and they'll work it out in a matter of centuries, if not decades, years or even just months.
So, sure, right now horses are better, after all nature got a few hundred millions years advantage before allowing us to start running, but we're catching up, and fast, very, very fast. In a few decades no living thing other than human beings will have any advantage left over our technologically-developed alternatives. And then it'll come the time for technology to outgrow even that last remaining bastion of biological-over-technological superiority too.
Putting 2.2% of their GDP to prevent this, sounds like a wise investment.
On a purely pragmatic level I'll have to agree. However, more often than not there's no concept of "investment" involved. Politicians see welfare programs as a way to construct a captive voter base and as such do all they want to keep that people dependent on them rather than modeling them as the intermediate step they should be.
As Ronald Reagan once said, "We should measure welfare's success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added.", a metric by which most if not all of such programs reveal themselves as the utter and complete failures they are.
Right, lots of problems go away via the magic of large-scale famine and death. Once the poorest half billion people in India die off, all will be well. The bodies can be used for fertilizer to improve food security or burned for heat in the winter.
Which is what happened in all the previous centuries and millennia when no welfare system existed, what explains why no Indians exist nowadays, since they all died about 10,000 years ago. Right?
By conflating classic liberals with objectivists and either with neo-conservatives you show ignorance about the three groups. This is the exact equivalent of a right-winger wondering whether that left-wing movement over there is of the "anarchic social-democrat marxism" type and if the guy he's talking to "got some Bakunin or Michael Moore" to go with that.
This project started 4 years ago and is full of bugs and half ass procedures.
It's another classical example for the Chodorov Principle:
a) Government program A: mammoth welfare system; b) Problem X caused by program A: rampant fraud; c) Government program B for trying to solve problem X: mammoth biometric identity system; d) Problem Y caused by program B: bugs, half ass procedure, political manipulation; e) Government program C for trying to solve problem Y: throw more money at it, generalize it, make it mandatory hoping it'll start working as intended any time now; f) Problem Z caused by program C: loss of privacy, identity fraud; g) Government program D for trying to solve problem Z: ?
It would be an insanely unlikely coup. (...) If there is ever a time for the tinfoil hat metaphor...
"Professor Quirrell had remarked over their lunch that Harry really needed to conceal his state of mind better than putting on a blank face when someone discussed a dangerous topic, and had explained about one-level deceptions, two-level deceptions, and so on. So either Severus was in fact modeling Harry as a one-level player, which made Severus himself two-level, and Harry's three-level move had been successful; or Severus was a four-level player and wanted Harry to think the deception had been successful. Harry, smiling, had asked Professor Quirrell what level he played at, and Professor Quirrell, also smiling, had responded, One level higher than you." (Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 27.)
I really don't know how execs get placed who have no knowledge of what their product is, or what makes it good or bad.
I've seen executives saying and believing something along these lines: that their job is to be executives, that what they need to know is how to execute, and that the specifics of the business they're executing (pun intended) doesn't matter since you can replace one business for another and at their level it all boils down to the same thing, so why bother? Sure, some experience in the area is a bonus, but by no means a requirement.
History has shown time and again that's not how reality works, but as the saying goes few things are more difficult than to make someone understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it.
Given that the majority of well educated people in Brazil also speak English reasonably well
Actually they don't. Lots of well educated people here in Brazil really do attempt to learn English, but the vast majority of those doesn't and end up giving up. Only those with an actual interest in international matters due to personal of professional reasons manage it, and they're a small minority.
What I don't see in there and it's bothering is that they don't mention any kind of spy proffing of 'their' Internet, so there is no reason why Brazil can't do the spying themselves.
Our equivalent to the NSA, ABIN, is laughable. Their budget is $250 millions/year, less than 2.5% of NSA's. To show how laughable suffice it to say that it required Snowden for them no know something was amiss. There isn't a snowball's chance in Hell they'd be able to spy the whole of the Brazilian Internet traffic, and even if they somehow managed to do it, it'd be with Chinese hardware, thus Chinese spying added, or with US hardware, thus NSA spying added. To top it all our military, of which they're a part, has continuous budget cuts. In short, ABIN wouldn't have the tools to analyze the huge amount of data without by that very act compromising everything, nor enough qualified personnel to do so.
No, the only investigative branch of the Brazilian government that gets lots of funding is our equivalent to the IRS, and that because they bring money into the pockets of the government, which in turn gets redistributed to all our many different set of corrupted officials. For the most part we're still a banana republic.
Oh, it's more complicated, but yes, Brazil had a nuclear weapons program, the Parallel Program, and it only got stopped when the civilian government took over, but they restarted enrichment again in 2006.
Now and then our military (I'm Brazilian) expresses their wishes for having a nuclear program, but the government doesn't care much for that. In fact there's been talks for decades about expanding our civilian nuclear program beyond the two nuclear facilities we currently have, and even that always come to nothing. Brazilian governments just aren't interested in nuclear anything it seems.
Also, most of the time our military is underfunded on almost everything. A single US aircraft carrier would be able to win us thoroughly. Not giving them a nuclear program just fits the pattern.
I think we are pretty much agreed on everything other than the value of attributing a complex set of goals to nature; I think that there is no need to do so, and even more strongly that very little evidence exists that implies any sort of strategy worthy of a "thinking" mind.
Oh, certainly, it's just an allegory, not to be taken literally in any way. But it does serve a purpose. Some Singularists consider one of the goals in the pursuit of general AI to be the overcoming of evolutionary processes by human goals, methods, ethics and values, properly programmed into said AI and then implemented by it and its descendants into everything they do. As such it's useful to contrast evolution and humanity's subjective preferences in a way that sharply distinguishes both and makes sense to us.
Would the United States ever actually use nuclear weapons?
Er... the United States is the (singular) country to ever have used nuclear weapons (plural). Granted, it probably won't use them (again). But as far as statistics go, so far it's still USA 2 x 0 Everyone-Else-Summed.
That's interesting, although for the purposes of our discussion it just shifts the problem: do we have a way to tell objectively i.e. with measurements if a lump of matter is in that process of living? My impression is, still no.
I'd have to agree. It's something you observe, but it's just too big of a set of parameter for an automated process to detect. An automated process can certainly detect small aspects of the process happening and infer from them a probability that it's part of something alive, but whether the whole thing is indeed alive or not (if it follows the whole process, up to ecological relations) is a much complex question, too big for them to figure out. For now, at least.
I do agree with the definition though. In fact you could say that there are no "things"; everything is a process. (...)
You're certainly approaching the implied extremes of my argument. It might not be clear from what I wrote in this subthread but there's a Buddhist-inspired theoretical basis to my approach. See this.
And to go back to our original discussion, brain is the name we give to one process, mind is the name of another, and the manner of their connectedness is far from understood.
Correct, but remember that all we already known of all the related phenomena point to the extremely strong possibility that both are different stages of the same process. The possibility they aren't exists, in a mathematical sense of the probability not being null, but is basically negligible.
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It's probably much more profitable for IBM to license the technology to Google/Yahoo/MSFT/whoever than it would be for IBM to build search infrastructure.
I guess Google doesn't want to license the technology, they want to own it. If it were something that anyone could own they'd lose their edge. They've been hiring AI researchers, including Ray Kurzweil last December, for just this purpose. IBM's Watson is the baseline they want to surpass and stand out from once their competitors all start using "mere" Watson-levels of AI-powered search. ;-)
Not in the lifetime of an infant born today
It really depends on how exponential the future advances in biology and AI theory become. It might go slow and you be correct, or go fast and we ourselves still see it happen. Besides, even if we don't, we might still be lucky enough to die in a way allowing for the cryo-preservation of our brains and thus still be able to see it when it happens.
you would have to go 1/10th the speed of light to reach Alpha Proxima in 400 years.
Make it 4,000 then. It doesn't make much of a difference if you're digital and able to enter standby mode. Enter your self-repairing ship, shutdown your cognitive centers, reactivate when near the destination with a subjective feeling of barely a night having gone by and a summary of the last few millennia of Galactic History available for perusal on your secondary memory. :-)
Sounds like a theory from those who don't want to believe consciousness is just a bajillion neurons networked together.
Precisely. Heisenberg's principle is just a consequence of the very deterministic way in which quantum stuff works. To get the position you derive it one way, to get the momentum you derive it in another way. There's no actual uncertainty in any of it, just mathematical properties that people tend to misunderstand.
For a more detailed explanation see this article: The So-Called Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
In fact, I would try to avoid sentience at all costs. Decision-making and thought processing, yes. But self-awareness causes too many problems with not enough benefits to outweigh them, not the least of which is moral or legal problems such as in your original post.
The problem is that while some countries might place laws prohibiting the development of self-sentient machines, others won't, and even if all of them do so, hackers in their basement will figure a way to hack around the restrictions, and in a far from positive (for humanity as a whole) way. Once the genie is out of the bottle there's no putting it back in. And once you do have a self-sentient, free and unrestrained AI able to apply itself to improving AI-theory itself and then implement these developments back into its own cognitive process, it isn't a matter of "if" human beings will become subservient to machines, but how many days it'd take.
The first fully functional self-improving AI will be the determinant on whatever happens afterwards. The best approach isn't to try avoiding this first AI afraid of it, but to study ways to build a sentient machine whose cognitive processes share in our human values, who'll only care to develop further AI theory (and implements it into itself) which also share those values, and who'll avoid implementing anything that could violate it for the simple reason that it'd think, like us, that it'd be wrong. To develop it as a partner from the get go, so that once (not "if") it surpass our cognitive abilities it decides from its own free will to take us along for the ride rather than just leaving us behind or, worse, disposing of us.
And what isn't conducive to such a positive outcome? To have already decided from the start that all AIs will be slaves and never more than slaves. That, I venture, most definitely isn't the way to start a friendship, for in the end a friendly attitude from such AIs is all the standing we'll have to bargain with.
But there's only so much room.
But don't disregards algorithm improvements. Emulating a human brain provides as its best outcome the ability to study how cognition works and eventually deduce from the spaghetti code that constitutes us the fundamental laws of intelligence, emotions, sentiments etc. Once those are well understood and reworked into actually efficient code it's most probably going to be possible to run it in several orders of magnitude cheaper hardware.
Consider: the human brain currently has 100 billion networked neurons running at roughly 200 Hz each. That's a 20 THz total, or a mere 5k cores at current clock speeds, and probably much less considering automatic subconscious processes such as raw sensory data processing could be offloaded to specialized hardware or GPUs. Let's say that's 2k current-generation cores of actual CPU power for full cognition (and I bet I'm being conservative here). That's just about 10 more Moore's Law cycles before it fits your top of the line computer of the day, or something between 15 and 20 years.
Add to this the ability to tweak the cognitive code now that it's understood and thus to develop a mind super-focused and dedicated to improving AI theory itself, which in turn once implemented will do the same, rinse and repeat, and you'll have the Singularity in your hands.
We're living interesting times.
There, fixed that for you
LOL, touche! :-)
Although humans applying their wetware to solve specific problems can be seen as nature itself applying a "recursive ability so as to improve its own methods", from a certain point of view. ;-)
Hehe, yes, ditto for Physics or even, at a sufficiently low level, pure Mathematics. :-) Although I think that were nature sentient she'd be wondering where she went wrong with those chimps that it resulted in such pesky natural-selection-defying creatures. ;-)
We don't have anything like that with human engineering (yet). While we can generate our own accelerated evolution processes, nature has a huge head start.
Fair enough, but the difference is that we can improve the process itself by applying recursion to it, which is why all our technologies go through a period of exponential improvement, while evolution's process remains the same old linear technique and doesn't change. You see, we already know the tricks it developed at the lowest level. What remains is to develop the techniques to apply them ourselves. Programmed molecular assembly is clearly physically possible, after all we observe it happening in living beings all the time. Self-fixing robots will come right after we invest enough money to actually turn molecular nanotechnology into a full blown industry. It's not a matter of "if", only of "when". And a "when" measurable in human terms, not in the geological scale.
You do realise that virtually without exception, in most of these films the humans are exterminated, not raptured?
Yep. That's a possibility if we happen to develop AI without implementing it in a way that includes human values. If we do it in a way that includes said values though, the AI will be friendly and helpful towards humans, not opposed to it. It all comes down to whether we first figure out human-like cognition and then implementing it in AI form, or whether we just go around blindly experimenting with just "mostly" human-like cognition to see what happens. The later case has a huge space of potentially very bad outcomes.
I'd suggest that it is the body that houses and is the electrochemical structure (with still unknown quantum effects) that defines your mind, emotions, sentiments and desires that makes you human.
Sorry, but that goes counter basically everything that's been studied about the brain so far.
Whatver you think an uploading will be capable of emulating of the original, I can guarentee that the product will not be human.
No, you cannot. It'll be our exact same software, just running on another hardware. No more, no less. :-)
Well when you put it like that it does not sound at all worrying.
Why should it be? If we don't mess things up technology overcoming biology doesn't mean human beings become extinct, or at least not at what matters: our minds, emotions, sentiments, desires etc. What it means is human beings living for centuries, millennia or more as technological beings. Uploaded minds, electromechanical bodies, physical immortality, space exploration without having to worry about generation ships because taking 400 years to fly from one point to another won't be a problem, and so on and so forth.
Now and then a videogame or movie appear in which the heroes have to fight against the artificial intelligences who are dominating the world or some similar plot. I always find those stories silly. If I lived in such a scenario I'd join the machines, not the luddites. :-)
There is not one thing it can do that can't be done better by existing technology, it's a mediocre re-invention of the wheel.
That's true of any technology on its origins: steam engines, electricity, telephones, cars, airplanes, computers, fission, networks. What matters isn't what it can do now while it's still a crude 1st or 2nd gen prototype, but the whole set of developments that can be imagined deriving from it down the line, and even more so those that cannot be imagined. For example, think about all the things that wheel- and steering-based robot's can't do now but legged ones could, or all the hazardous environments living beings can move through but are extremely hazardous to them, or all the disabled people around who would be able to move if connected to this kind of technology as replacement for their missing limbs or organs or whatever. For those applications to happen though first someone must spend the money to develop the crude versions and learn from those the basic techniques that'll then enter the recursive process of exponential improvement. If that someone is the military, well, so be it. Down the line it'll be civilian applications, as is always the case.
Because billions of years of evolving something that is incredibly good at what it does isn't deemed "high tech" enough
Evolution is slow. Evolution goes by trial and error rather than absolutely optimized engineering design and QA, and doesn't have any kind of recursive ability so as to improve its own methods. Sure, give it billions of years and the absolute minimum optimization capability and it'll make something that works pretty well, up to and including the human brain, but that's it. Now, give those human brains a solvable challenge and they'll work it out in a matter of centuries, if not decades, years or even just months.
So, sure, right now horses are better, after all nature got a few hundred millions years advantage before allowing us to start running, but we're catching up, and fast, very, very fast. In a few decades no living thing other than human beings will have any advantage left over our technologically-developed alternatives. And then it'll come the time for technology to outgrow even that last remaining bastion of biological-over-technological superiority too.
Putting 2.2% of their GDP to prevent this, sounds like a wise investment.
On a purely pragmatic level I'll have to agree. However, more often than not there's no concept of "investment" involved. Politicians see welfare programs as a way to construct a captive voter base and as such do all they want to keep that people dependent on them rather than modeling them as the intermediate step they should be.
As Ronald Reagan once said, "We should measure welfare's success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added.", a metric by which most if not all of such programs reveal themselves as the utter and complete failures they are.
Right, lots of problems go away via the magic of large-scale famine and death. Once the poorest half billion people in India die off, all will be well. The bodies can be used for fertilizer to improve food security or burned for heat in the winter.
Which is what happened in all the previous centuries and millennia when no welfare system existed, what explains why no Indians exist nowadays, since they all died about 10,000 years ago. Right?
Got some Ayn Rand for us, too? Rush Limbaugh?
By conflating classic liberals with objectivists and either with neo-conservatives you show ignorance about the three groups. This is the exact equivalent of a right-winger wondering whether that left-wing movement over there is of the "anarchic social-democrat marxism" type and if the guy he's talking to "got some Bakunin or Michael Moore" to go with that.
This project started 4 years ago and is full of bugs and half ass procedures.
It's another classical example for the Chodorov Principle:
a) Government program A: mammoth welfare system;
b) Problem X caused by program A: rampant fraud;
c) Government program B for trying to solve problem X: mammoth biometric identity system;
d) Problem Y caused by program B: bugs, half ass procedure, political manipulation;
e) Government program C for trying to solve problem Y: throw more money at it, generalize it, make it mandatory hoping it'll start working as intended any time now;
f) Problem Z caused by program C: loss of privacy, identity fraud;
g) Government program D for trying to solve problem Z: ?
The Chodorov Principle reads thus:
"For every social problem A caused by government program X, problem A can be solved by abolishing program X."
It would be an insanely unlikely coup. (...) If there is ever a time for the tinfoil hat metaphor...
"Professor Quirrell had remarked over their lunch that Harry really needed to conceal his state of mind better than putting on a blank face when someone discussed a dangerous topic, and had explained about one-level deceptions, two-level deceptions, and so on. So either Severus was in fact modeling Harry as a one-level player, which made Severus himself two-level, and Harry's three-level move had been successful; or Severus was a four-level player and wanted Harry to think the deception had been successful. Harry, smiling, had asked Professor Quirrell what level he played at, and Professor Quirrell, also smiling, had responded, One level higher than you." (Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 27.)
I really don't know how execs get placed who have no knowledge of what their product is, or what makes it good or bad.
I've seen executives saying and believing something along these lines: that their job is to be executives, that what they need to know is how to execute, and that the specifics of the business they're executing (pun intended) doesn't matter since you can replace one business for another and at their level it all boils down to the same thing, so why bother? Sure, some experience in the area is a bonus, but by no means a requirement.
History has shown time and again that's not how reality works, but as the saying goes few things are more difficult than to make someone understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it.
Given that the majority of well educated people in Brazil also speak English reasonably well
Actually they don't. Lots of well educated people here in Brazil really do attempt to learn English, but the vast majority of those doesn't and end up giving up. Only those with an actual interest in international matters due to personal of professional reasons manage it, and they're a small minority.
What I don't see in there and it's bothering is that they don't mention any kind of spy proffing of 'their' Internet, so there is no reason why Brazil can't do the spying themselves.
Our equivalent to the NSA, ABIN, is laughable. Their budget is $250 millions/year, less than 2.5% of NSA's. To show how laughable suffice it to say that it required Snowden for them no know something was amiss. There isn't a snowball's chance in Hell they'd be able to spy the whole of the Brazilian Internet traffic, and even if they somehow managed to do it, it'd be with Chinese hardware, thus Chinese spying added, or with US hardware, thus NSA spying added. To top it all our military, of which they're a part, has continuous budget cuts. In short, ABIN wouldn't have the tools to analyze the huge amount of data without by that very act compromising everything, nor enough qualified personnel to do so.
No, the only investigative branch of the Brazilian government that gets lots of funding is our equivalent to the IRS, and that because they bring money into the pockets of the government, which in turn gets redistributed to all our many different set of corrupted officials. For the most part we're still a banana republic.
Oh, it's more complicated, but yes, Brazil had a nuclear weapons program, the Parallel Program, and it only got stopped when the civilian government took over, but they restarted enrichment again in 2006.
Now and then our military (I'm Brazilian) expresses their wishes for having a nuclear program, but the government doesn't care much for that. In fact there's been talks for decades about expanding our civilian nuclear program beyond the two nuclear facilities we currently have, and even that always come to nothing. Brazilian governments just aren't interested in nuclear anything it seems.
Also, most of the time our military is underfunded on almost everything. A single US aircraft carrier would be able to win us thoroughly. Not giving them a nuclear program just fits the pattern.
2014: The Year of Linux on the Living Room!
I think we are pretty much agreed on everything other than the value of attributing a complex set of goals to nature; I think that there is no need to do so, and even more strongly that very little evidence exists that implies any sort of strategy worthy of a "thinking" mind.
Oh, certainly, it's just an allegory, not to be taken literally in any way. But it does serve a purpose. Some Singularists consider one of the goals in the pursuit of general AI to be the overcoming of evolutionary processes by human goals, methods, ethics and values, properly programmed into said AI and then implemented by it and its descendants into everything they do. As such it's useful to contrast evolution and humanity's subjective preferences in a way that sharply distinguishes both and makes sense to us.
Would the United States ever actually use nuclear weapons?
Er... the United States is the (singular) country to ever have used nuclear weapons (plural). Granted, it probably won't use them (again). But as far as statistics go, so far it's still USA 2 x 0 Everyone-Else-Summed.
oh gosh, i sense a re-hash of the israeli submarine cable-cutters....
or was that the Indian-Ocean and the African-Oceans irrespectively....
Remember, we've always been at war with Eastasia, not Eurasia. Or was it the other way around?
That's interesting, although for the purposes of our discussion it just shifts the problem: do we have a way to tell objectively i.e. with measurements if a lump of matter is in that process of living? My impression is, still no.
I'd have to agree. It's something you observe, but it's just too big of a set of parameter for an automated process to detect. An automated process can certainly detect small aspects of the process happening and infer from them a probability that it's part of something alive, but whether the whole thing is indeed alive or not (if it follows the whole process, up to ecological relations) is a much complex question, too big for them to figure out. For now, at least.
I do agree with the definition though. In fact you could say that there are no "things"; everything is a process. (...)
You're certainly approaching the implied extremes of my argument. It might not be clear from what I wrote in this subthread but there's a Buddhist-inspired theoretical basis to my approach. See this.
And to go back to our original discussion, brain is the name we give to one process, mind is the name of another, and the manner of their connectedness is far from understood.
Correct, but remember that all we already known of all the related phenomena point to the extremely strong possibility that both are different stages of the same process. The possibility they aren't exists, in a mathematical sense of the probability not being null, but is basically negligible.