There are Java applets that academics wrote as quick illustrations of some concept from their lecture course in the 1990s that are still just as valid and still work just as well today
Odd, I found about 50% of such things don't work anymore. (And it feels risky to even try them.)
Anyhow, we need a new browser standard/paradigm that gives brower-based applications desktop-like behavior and natively supports common desktop idioms, such as scroll-bars, MDI, combo-boxes, grid editors, etc. so that one doesn't have to download an entire JS GUI library for each app.
Desktop GUI's idioms pretty much matured by the early 90's; it's not like a moving standard (ignoring certain stupid eye-candy fads). Web standards don't fit what app developers want to do and what users expect. The web standards are fairly good at brochure-ware, but suck for work-oriented applications and CRUD GUI's. Getting such GUI's to work and still work after 3 years should NOT be an arcane art. It's around 5 to 20 times the code it takes for an app in VB, Delphi, Paradox, PowerBuilder, etc., and flakier.
I'm tired of the crapped up web stack for apps. It's a resource drain and huge leap backward.
Correction, it probably should be "from a little box" instead of "in a little box". Smart-phones often rely on servers they network with for many types of queries.
Eliza gave mostly fake, canned responses with the user's key-words sprinkled in. It was not practical.
I will agree that Siri's technology existed in labs by the late 70's, for the most part, but moving from lab/garage/experiment to common use quite often takes a couple a decades. Same with TV, cars, transistor radios, and others.
You can ask Siri about type-of-food restaurant locations, current weather, appointments, and most of the other typical smart-phone services, all in a little box. It's not as flexible as a human would be, but the criteria is "impressive", not "as good as a human".
the latter is conceivable, but there's no reason to believe it.
And there's no reason to discount it yet. We just don't know, or at least don't have a clear enough and agreed-upon definition of "consciousness" to score it on a scale.
I misunderstood what you meant by "blinking". I interpreted it as involuntary blinking at first. The blinking man was able to communicate, just very slowly. (That kind of must be how the New Horizons probe feels:-)
Come on, Siri would be quite impressive if you showed it to a researcher from the 1950's. Same with the IBM chess win. Our expectations have simply increased and/or it "looks simple" after you see how its done.
When I first read the headline, I pictured a robot's arms flailing about, whacking its human competitor upside the noggin. "So, A.I. finally got the emotion thing down."
Enough to hit every box on your checklist without breaking a sweat.
Paint me skeptical.
And the collectively complex [ant] colony behaviour arises from pretty simple stuff.
So does the human brain's activity: a bunch of basic cells hooked up to each other like a huge blob of gray pasta.
A paralyzed human who can't move, or adapt, or do anything but blink is still fully conscious to human standards.
Unless they recover enough to communicate experiences to compare, we'd have no way knowing. What "standards"?
Can it? Is a single cell fertilzed egg just "less conscious"? As it divides and multiplies through the zygote stage, is it a little more conscious? As the cells differentiate and specialize... as it becomes a fetus does it become still more conscious?
Perhaps. We'd have to agree on continuous metric to say either way. (It might be more practical to divide it into sub-metrics.)
Part of the problem is that if you halt the process due to a potential problem, you are almost sure to look bad because the project is delayed. It's a sure-shot "hit" to your record. Nobody wants to look bad.
And they are weighing that against the risk of a catastrophic failure, which although makes one look VERY bad, is often judged to be relatively remote.
To move up in rank you almost have to have an aggressive personality, and aggressiveness may involve "gittur done" risk taking. Thus, the promotion process breeds such risk-taking.
I'm not entirely sure how to work around this. It's happened to NASA twice, BP, and Japan with regard to their power plant problems, among others.
If you spot a shady or risky practice in the works, I suggest you write your caution in an email and CC enough people to have a decent record.
You WILL likely take flack for sending it, but it provides you with a degree of protection if The Finger is aimed at you later. Better to be slapped early once than risk being spanked 10x later.
Just make sure you word it politely. There are ways of mentioning risk without sounding too much like a spoil-sport.
Example: "I'm concerned that using non-US labor increases the risk of intellectual property loss because they are outside the reach and jurisdiction of the USA courts, law enforcement, and our organization's own private investigators. Attached are some articles on real-life occurrences of this. [Do your homework: present evidence.] This project highly depends on the safe-keeping of intellectual property, which is put at greater risk under such practices. If you feel my concerns are unfounded, I welcome an expanded discussion on this. Thank you for letting me express my concerns."
Well, perhaps. There's seems to be a lot of overlap, however. I don't know if or where to draw a hard line. It's a vocabulary exercise that can trigger long debates. I've seen the definition of "life" drive everyone into a frenzy at the (semi-defunct) c2.com wiki, and these words have a similar potential.
But I could trivially mimic your interactions and feel nothing.
Trivially? I don't think so, at least not well.
And we don't know what "feel" is exactly. It's easier to feel "it" than define it.
I don't know that I think an ant has coinsciousness
Since neither of us have been an ant, perhaps it's premature to comment on it. (Although I've had a boss who treated us as ants.)
And as I suggested, "consciousness" could a matter of degree. Humans can adapt to changes in environment better than ants, and thus could be considered "more conscious".
And maybe ants do have a "collective consciousness". They seem to adapt fairly well at colony level. They've learned to make their trails around areas we've sprayed with insecticide around our house, for example. At first they fell for it, but somehow learned to go around.
Perhaps it's a "distributed consciousness". Just because individual ants seem dull and drone-like, doesn't mean that as a group they don't "perceive" at a higher abstraction. We have to be careful not to let our human-ness bias us against other possible forms of consciousness.
There's a lot we don't understand about other creatures.
Rats, I fouled up my corrections also. Doesn't significantly affect readability, though. I just don't want to be nagged by anal trolls. Let 'em nag. Overhaul English if you want to do it right.
From a practical side, conscientious can be, and sometimes is, described as an awareness of one's immediate surroundings. Thus, a robot that responds and reacts to objects around it in predictable way(s) could be said to be "conscious" to some extent.
A "degree" of consciousness could perhaps be assigned based on knowledge of one's surroundings, such as the ability to offer different responses based on the "kind" of things around, and the ability to predict their behavior (usually based on observations, computations, and/or past knowledge).
This does require some responses, though. If a person in an apparent coma is fully aware of everything around them but cannot move or talk, then observers will never be able to verify their perception (assuming they don't describe it later when they regain speech).
If you base the definition on feelings instead of observable interactions, then you'll have a tricky time objectively verifying the existence, levels, and/or properties of "consciousnesses". This is not saying that a definition based on feelings is "wrong", but merely that it's harder to work with and talk about. A definition being accurate (reflecting human usage of terms) and being useful are sometimes at odds.
For example, we all know what "hate" is, but defining it based on observable behavior can get sticky. Maybe Bob smacked Harry because Bob is insane, not necessarily because Bob hates Harry. Generally we'd try to spot multiple different behaviors that triangulate to "hate" to confirm it's existence, such as frowning when the person is around. We could make a check-list of behaviors associated with hate and maybe require a certain percent be covered before we conclude "likely to be hatred".
(My interactions with domestic telecoms would probably fill the checklist.)
Socialist economies don't exist in the western world. There is no such thing as a socialist economy in the western world.
I meant socialist-leaning. Most economies are a mix of capitalism and socialism, with the mix varying. I thought this was obvious and known such that it didn't have to be explicitly spelled out (making for verbose reading).
In every case I can point to government mismanagement so you'd have a very hard time citing the collapses as being an argument for more government control.
That's because humans are involved, and humans screw up. If function X is taken over by private companies or something else, humans would STILL be involved and still foul up at about the same rate. Thus, the total screw-up-ness being done is relatively constant whether the gov't is involved or not. You are blaming the wrong factor.
Banks making stupid decisions are also a huge factor, perhaps the largest.
Canada's regulations appear to have prevented a mortgage bubble in their country because they kept their relatively tight housing loan requirements in place while everybody else was loosening them. THEY did gov't right.
It seems they just got this thing on-line and up to full capacity in the last couple of years. Now it's already obsolete?
I must be getting old or something: stuff seems to change so fast it's obsolete before even being used. Should I get bell-bottom jeans? I might still have a pair from the last bell era.
Slashdot Mirror
Good idea on paper, but the sandboxes leaked.
Odd, I found about 50% of such things don't work anymore. (And it feels risky to even try them.)
Anyhow, we need a new browser standard/paradigm that gives brower-based applications desktop-like behavior and natively supports common desktop idioms, such as scroll-bars, MDI, combo-boxes, grid editors, etc. so that one doesn't have to download an entire JS GUI library for each app.
Desktop GUI's idioms pretty much matured by the early 90's; it's not like a moving standard (ignoring certain stupid eye-candy fads). Web standards don't fit what app developers want to do and what users expect. The web standards are fairly good at brochure-ware, but suck for work-oriented applications and CRUD GUI's. Getting such GUI's to work and still work after 3 years should NOT be an arcane art. It's around 5 to 20 times the code it takes for an app in VB, Delphi, Paradox, PowerBuilder, etc., and flakier.
I'm tired of the crapped up web stack for apps. It's a resource drain and huge leap backward.
Correction, it probably should be "from a little box" instead of "in a little box". Smart-phones often rely on servers they network with for many types of queries.
Eliza gave mostly fake, canned responses with the user's key-words sprinkled in. It was not practical.
I will agree that Siri's technology existed in labs by the late 70's, for the most part, but moving from lab/garage/experiment to common use quite often takes a couple a decades. Same with TV, cars, transistor radios, and others.
You can ask Siri about type-of-food restaurant locations, current weather, appointments, and most of the other typical smart-phone services, all in a little box. It's not as flexible as a human would be, but the criteria is "impressive", not "as good as a human".
And there's no reason to discount it yet. We just don't know, or at least don't have a clear enough and agreed-upon definition of "consciousness" to score it on a scale.
I misunderstood what you meant by "blinking". I interpreted it as involuntary blinking at first. The blinking man was able to communicate, just very slowly. (That kind of must be how the New Horizons probe feels :-)
And how does an organization determine that?
"Astronauts who cannot fly on their own are big losers, like McCain for getting caught."
You forget there is a growing wealth class, while the rest of us are in the Stagnant Class(es).
Come on, Siri would be quite impressive if you showed it to a researcher from the 1950's. Same with the IBM chess win. Our expectations have simply increased and/or it "looks simple" after you see how its done.
When I first read the headline, I pictured a robot's arms flailing about, whacking its human competitor upside the noggin. "So, A.I. finally got the emotion thing down."
Paint me skeptical.
So does the human brain's activity: a bunch of basic cells hooked up to each other like a huge blob of gray pasta.
Unless they recover enough to communicate experiences to compare, we'd have no way knowing. What "standards"?
Perhaps. We'd have to agree on continuous metric to say either way. (It might be more practical to divide it into sub-metrics.)
Part of the problem is that if you halt the process due to a potential problem, you are almost sure to look bad because the project is delayed. It's a sure-shot "hit" to your record. Nobody wants to look bad.
And they are weighing that against the risk of a catastrophic failure, which although makes one look VERY bad, is often judged to be relatively remote.
To move up in rank you almost have to have an aggressive personality, and aggressiveness may involve "gittur done" risk taking. Thus, the promotion process breeds such risk-taking.
I'm not entirely sure how to work around this. It's happened to NASA twice, BP, and Japan with regard to their power plant problems, among others.
That's why it's a status symbol: only the wealthy can afford to keep it running.
Jaguar is like that also.
You are in luck, they are bringing Mr. Fusion back also:
https://www.google.com/shoppin...
Now on to hoverboards...
If Mr. Fusion jams, you'll have plenty of flies.
Amen!
CYA Rule #7: Put it in writing.
If you spot a shady or risky practice in the works, I suggest you write your caution in an email and CC enough people to have a decent record.
You WILL likely take flack for sending it, but it provides you with a degree of protection if The Finger is aimed at you later. Better to be slapped early once than risk being spanked 10x later.
Just make sure you word it politely. There are ways of mentioning risk without sounding too much like a spoil-sport.
Example: "I'm concerned that using non-US labor increases the risk of intellectual property loss because they are outside the reach and jurisdiction of the USA courts, law enforcement, and our organization's own private investigators. Attached are some articles on real-life occurrences of this. [Do your homework: present evidence.] This project highly depends on the safe-keeping of intellectual property, which is put at greater risk under such practices. If you feel my concerns are unfounded, I welcome an expanded discussion on this. Thank you for letting me express my concerns."
I said "anal trolls", not "nail trolls". Big diff...I think
Well, perhaps. There's seems to be a lot of overlap, however. I don't know if or where to draw a hard line. It's a vocabulary exercise that can trigger long debates. I've seen the definition of "life" drive everyone into a frenzy at the (semi-defunct) c2.com wiki, and these words have a similar potential.
Trivially? I don't think so, at least not well.
And we don't know what "feel" is exactly. It's easier to feel "it" than define it.
Since neither of us have been an ant, perhaps it's premature to comment on it. (Although I've had a boss who treated us as ants.)
And as I suggested, "consciousness" could a matter of degree. Humans can adapt to changes in environment better than ants, and thus could be considered "more conscious".
And maybe ants do have a "collective consciousness". They seem to adapt fairly well at colony level. They've learned to make their trails around areas we've sprayed with insecticide around our house, for example. At first they fell for it, but somehow learned to go around.
Perhaps it's a "distributed consciousness". Just because individual ants seem dull and drone-like, doesn't mean that as a group they don't "perceive" at a higher abstraction. We have to be careful not to let our human-ness bias us against other possible forms of consciousness.
There's a lot we don't understand about other creatures.
Rats, I fouled up my corrections also. Doesn't significantly affect readability, though. I just don't want to be nagged by anal trolls. Let 'em nag. Overhaul English if you want to do it right.
Typo: "conscientious" should be "consciousnesses".
Clarification re: "usually based on observations, computations, and/or past knowledge"
Reworked: "usually based on observations, computations, and/or knowledge gained from an external source."
From a practical side, conscientious can be, and sometimes is, described as an awareness of one's immediate surroundings. Thus, a robot that responds and reacts to objects around it in predictable way(s) could be said to be "conscious" to some extent.
A "degree" of consciousness could perhaps be assigned based on knowledge of one's surroundings, such as the ability to offer different responses based on the "kind" of things around, and the ability to predict their behavior (usually based on observations, computations, and/or past knowledge).
This does require some responses, though. If a person in an apparent coma is fully aware of everything around them but cannot move or talk, then observers will never be able to verify their perception (assuming they don't describe it later when they regain speech).
If you base the definition on feelings instead of observable interactions, then you'll have a tricky time objectively verifying the existence, levels, and/or properties of "consciousnesses". This is not saying that a definition based on feelings is "wrong", but merely that it's harder to work with and talk about. A definition being accurate (reflecting human usage of terms) and being useful are sometimes at odds.
For example, we all know what "hate" is, but defining it based on observable behavior can get sticky. Maybe Bob smacked Harry because Bob is insane, not necessarily because Bob hates Harry. Generally we'd try to spot multiple different behaviors that triangulate to "hate" to confirm it's existence, such as frowning when the person is around. We could make a check-list of behaviors associated with hate and maybe require a certain percent be covered before we conclude "likely to be hatred".
(My interactions with domestic telecoms would probably fill the checklist.)
I meant socialist-leaning. Most economies are a mix of capitalism and socialism, with the mix varying. I thought this was obvious and known such that it didn't have to be explicitly spelled out (making for verbose reading).
That's because humans are involved, and humans screw up. If function X is taken over by private companies or something else, humans would STILL be involved and still foul up at about the same rate. Thus, the total screw-up-ness being done is relatively constant whether the gov't is involved or not. You are blaming the wrong factor.
Banks making stupid decisions are also a huge factor, perhaps the largest.
Canada's regulations appear to have prevented a mortgage bubble in their country because they kept their relatively tight housing loan requirements in place while everybody else was loosening them. THEY did gov't right.
and must have 15 or more years experience observing the Higgs boson evidence, and 20 years using Node.js in production. Recent graduates preferred.
It seems they just got this thing on-line and up to full capacity in the last couple of years. Now it's already obsolete?
I must be getting old or something: stuff seems to change so fast it's obsolete before even being used. Should I get bell-bottom jeans? I might still have a pair from the last bell era.