Even a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
Nobody with a healthy brain can claim that currently used techniques can recognize our thoughts. They can recognize some of our feelings or rather general state of mind and we also have techniques that after some training allow some people that lost their limbs to control the devices that replaced them. These are not very accurate but getting better if one is to believe the media. We started this journey and if that is possible (why should it not be) then we will get there some day. The question is - will this be a shinny day for all of humanity or only for the chosen ones.
Quite frankly I am all for a VR simulation of lesbian act between Sandra Bullock and Jennifer Lopez changing roles on each try of course, but I know better to what this is going to be used first, once we reach any meaningful thought recognition (which is very far away yet). You see I am old enough to know a 'perfect' solution with all whistles and shinny buttons and displays even so appealing as it may be, is useless if some of its aspects are like massive red flags waving in front of me. Especially whenI think about thought police that is already very well established. If this thing is going to be reasonably effective it will be also very dangerous for what is left of our freedoms too. I am not convinced that all the shiny benefits are bigger than costs and losses endured on the way.
My thoughts too. I think it has quite good uses too - people with missing extremities can get a replacement that is controlled well by such devices. I think that Mr Hawking would appreciate development in this area very much. Judging on how many problems male-female interactions are causing I think that a bit more sophisticated device helping to distinguish between 'ooohhh no no no' meaning 'please continue' or 'f.off or I call the police'. This said I must admit that knowing that somebody can evaluate your feelings if not thoughts may be spooky and may also be not for your benefit - I am thinking here about greedy corporations, criminals - normal and those in government, spying agencies, insurance companies (which are already not insurance companies but another tax authority with some limited utility attached to it) etc.
Maybe it is good that thought reading will not be very easy - Thinking processes are probably to dispersed and variable for the machines so that they would have to train even more and individually per brain. Development in this area gives us a little time to investigate the possible consequences for our society and what we think is beneficial. I am rather pessimistic on what will happen however. The hysteric 'think abut the children' crowd combined with 'cut his arm and perforate his anus - tough on crime' crowd together with general brainlessness of common folk will lead us there without preparation but with full speed - as the members of the dominating species do.
I find this funny. Not that people are treated like objects but your statement because it reminded me of a book I read few years back: 'London Hanged'. What was described there was the cycle of recurring violence in London (not sure anymore 16. or 17. century):
industry (cloth making or clockwork making etc) just developing, new skilled workers well paid
industry well established, workers paid less and less as methods are established and new less skilled workers needed.
riots, army on the streets, the particular industry regulated, better minimum conditions secured
the industry off-shores big chunk of work to the Netherlands
new blossoming industry is being developed - go to step 1 above
The most visible part were riots and there were times in London where these were happening with tiring regularity approx every 20y or so.
The whole thing about how evil humans are is true and at the same time untrue. Some basic regulations are needed so that people are not ripped off. If industry can survive only if they pay hunger wages then maybe it there is no reason for it to exist locally or some helping hand is needed, not necessarily in form of cheap credit or release from regulation but some industrial policy like the one Germans have would do something. OC for that one would need to have educated work force. BTW: Germans complain about missing hands on the floor all the time because people are not ready to work for money that are being offered. Seems to be the same story all over. What seems to have been working for England back then was that once one industry was not as profitable as it used to be a new one came around. The only unpleasant part were the hunger and riots on falling part of the curve.
Technically you can still outsource a plumber job to another company. I guess you meant offshoring not being really possible for plumbers and until technology does not replace that job completely this and lawyers stay a good option. Surely due to currently existing legal limitations one still needs lawyers in flesh standing in front of the judge. But research can be outsourced already.
I heard that Island is going to delegalize pr0n - could this act of law be considered a mutilation of innocent Island males then as it obviously affects their brains?
revolt of the washing machines and peace on earth are bit more appropriate I think but in general the master had predicted quite some of the things that become reality.
what work? The way this is going these days is that due to interdependent changes in economy, technology, organization etc the masses will be less and less employable. Other than that the diagnosis with tyranny is correct, I think.
I recall reading "The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate The World" in 2011 and thinking how this can evolve and what about things Morozov did not write, because he maybe did not know (or did not dare to write, being afraid of tin foil hat label etc). I have also an impression that in the world so small as ours (thanx to technology) some means of using the streams of data is needed anyway. Not only for terrorists but also for normal criminals. They use technology too and combating them in old fashion way is increasingly impossible. Checks and balances - that is the way to go. But then there are some tiny little problems, namely with democracy itself. We know now how silly it is to believe that our voices count - they do not. We may vote one asshole out of the office (not an easy feat but still possible) but what to do between elections? What about policies that we disagree with and which are anyway introduced?
Quite frankly, when I think about decisions our Great Leaders make (for the sake of democracy, human rights and their corporate friends), I have this sickening feeling of the past long gone - when for instance questions about discrepancies in party approved history books could mean no access to university (fortunately for me communism fell before this happened).
So there is a chance to get a low id number. I thought this site was a prank but if it still exists I may consider moving. OC the asshats that make any discussion impossible (like the ones discussing their dirty visions and Linus's weight gain here) may be tempted too, which is unfortunate.
yes you can misinterpret your data as we know gun lovers often do.
This and your government already oppresses your and other people - so how your guns stopped that? Maybe I missed that in the news - I lately cannot stand all the shit that is being 'reported' - but organized militia regularly fails to show up, when people are killed while SWAT teams invade their homes. Somehow I have a feeling that if your militia did show up then it would have to be really well organized not to directly die in a storm of fire. Care to explain this?
Not that we have much choice about that but if you can see with relative clarity what side effects a technology can have then it is good to think about those consequences so that in case they are clearly negative we can do something about that more effectively. This goes for instance for what some call internet security which means any issue associated with use pipes that can have detrimental effects on person's well being due to malicious activity of third party. You could not prevent all of it of course but maybe we would have to deal with less problems or maybe different ones. Still I would like to have benefits of current technology without for instance being made transparent to anybody with money and power etc.
in other words dealing with problems after they became real although one could see them coming is just silly.
some of these geek people have serious psychological issues of which some may be useful when coding. Calling that a culture is silly and does not do any good.
I did stalk my first ex before I learned tha this is bad and spooky for the subject of stalking. I was just leaving flowers at her door. This in our old traditions was actually appreciated and a sigin of courtship. Today it means I am a perv. I am less and less convinced that societal development we see we can call progress. Some of that maybe - like less acceptance for violence against some group etc. But if that is bound with grand silliness then accepting that en block is just counter productive.
I respect all people the same i.e. not all that much due to their stupidity. That includes meself.
By nature big proportion of males have high interest in female bodies. If it were not so we would not be here to discuss that. Stop it and human kind dissapears. I do not mind all that much actually.
how true. It is all a flamebait but it has an entertainment value.
It is also a nice exercise to think about consequences of getting rid of male sex drive alltogether. It would be actually good to think about that before thinking about how to get there.... But then again that is my perverted brain. I am male after all.
I missed sarcasm and web2.0 too - stopped reading at the word starting wioth c and ending with loud. Not sure why.... Must be late hour or so because GGP post was actually worth reading in whole.
so we have truly unbiased and non-discriminatory society where built-in attributes like gender and race play no role. Fantastic news! Pity majority of us cannot even dream of socializing with this noble group of people....
so the aliens have been bombing mars and now we discuss precision of their meteoring mars so that our united space command can ask for funds to waste them on on not working deflections systems?
'when given opportunity' is a key phrase. Society that is by principle and openly hard on crime to keep children safe and all these other things, goes quite close to giving a hint that this i.e. treating others like trash will be tolerated behaviour. Add to this overcrowding and privatization of penal system and you get a perfect situation when the condition you stated is almost always true. It is in fact a wonder that terrible things do not happen more often.
There is always a way around the difficulties. I would imagine that a prison is in itself a terrible thing to be in, no need for torture and some such. There are people there that can be helped in form of taking medication, by showing how to control their anger. There are also others that can be corrected by the fact they have been caught already. There are still others, for whom no amount of correction will help, who see prison term as unfortunate period of time they have to serve and possibly shorten in any way available. You have all those people - no need to apply not tested drugs combination to execute people that possibly did not commit the crime they are dying for, or put into inhumane conditions for smoking a prism of #. If I understand this correctly you are arguing that any form of changing of the mind, however peaceful and voluntary, ultimately leads to scenarios Orwell described in 1984 or Borges in Clockwork Orange. That is simply not true and if terrible things happen there is a way for the society to improve on that.
The question is interesting tho - clockwork orange showed an example of such treatment too. Any meaningful behavioral therapy will make differences such that you may worry. I guess you have to trust somebody. Not everybody that is trying explicitly to change you is a criminal or worse - an evil asshole from some agency protecting us from something.
Have they? This may be but for me most of adults are a waste of resources for number of reasons that are irrelevant for this discussion, as even if they were not such a waste they would still lose if I had a choice between my kids and strangers.
The situation complicates if the choice was between kids of somebody else and strangers but if strangers were not relevant to mine or kids survival they are doomed if I had to make a choice. You see the utility function is not what the master that invented it thought it was. The economists were dealing with illusion of understanding only to find out that what they were talking about is life of the non-existent creatures called econs instead of humans. In other words the utility analysis is just too simplified.
The interesting part is what you asked about yourself. You are most likely a geek (being here after all) and thus you evaluate your options with slow brain feature which means you rationalize things. This is a problem for the kids in this example because either you are a psychopath or have no kids on your own, IN later case you just do not see the immense effort put in kid's upbringing starting at the courtship to get the female, child bearing by its mother, care of a father about pregnant mother, and all others little things. Thus your assumption about value of some old farts in comparison of value of the kids is mistaken. This calculation may be different if you exchange the single choice for a complex one in which decision made now has impact on options available later. As in real life. These decision were made by numerous parents too - running away from coming armies of savages in a cold winter for instance make a family chose to leave first a grandpa then a pregnant wife than a kid only to ensure survival of at least some part of the family and thus an investment that has been made till now. These choice have been made actually and in Europe not that long time ago. Seems to be recurring part of our history... Coming back - there are situations in which a person that knows what parent and society invest in kids, will make a decision against kids but these are special, unfortunately not as special as not to exist at all.
correct. Coding has been difficult task for geniuses at the very beginning because of two reasons: price of equipment and difficulty of some of tasks at hand back at the time. These days almost enybody can do some coding - my kids learn scripting for office applications at school in 3rd grade - that is programming too. In my professional life I often deal with what you can call infrastructure projects where team size goes over 5persons and it cannot be squized in 3 months, usually having to work on existing code base and maintaining different versions of product in different phases of a life cycle.In such setups coding is a skill which requires quite some knowledge, it is just very important but minor thing - most of the time you deal with things that are not application coding but discussing architecture, ways of testing, release strategy, test automation strategy and some such. There are projects where teams refuse to deal with this issues in a structured way because they 'like coding' and ones where they accept that it is difficult to get done all these other things perfectly but it is nevertheless worthwhile as it saves some major stress later etc. In these setups coding is just part of project life but not the most important one. Testing or maintenance or any such thing is not part of any of the courses. It is still worthwhile as our office life is full of coding of some sort. It is a skill like (yes a car analogy!) car driving - most of us iin inustrilized world have a driving license and can drive but track bd bus drivers are still professionals with special license. The question is - do you want to be a track driver?
Slashdot Mirror
Even a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
Nobody with a healthy brain can claim that currently used techniques can recognize our thoughts. They can recognize some of our feelings or rather general state of mind and we also have techniques that after some training allow some people that lost their limbs to control the devices that replaced them. These are not very accurate but getting better if one is to believe the media. We started this journey and if that is possible (why should it not be) then we will get there some day. The question is - will this be a shinny day for all of humanity or only for the chosen ones.
Quite frankly I am all for a VR simulation of lesbian act between Sandra Bullock and Jennifer Lopez changing roles on each try of course, but I know better to what this is going to be used first, once we reach any meaningful thought recognition (which is very far away yet). You see I am old enough to know a 'perfect' solution with all whistles and shinny buttons and displays even so appealing as it may be, is useless if some of its aspects are like massive red flags waving in front of me. Especially whenI think about thought police that is already very well established. If this thing is going to be reasonably effective it will be also very dangerous for what is left of our freedoms too. I am not convinced that all the shiny benefits are bigger than costs and losses endured on the way.
My thoughts too. I think it has quite good uses too - people with missing extremities can get a replacement that is controlled well by such devices. I think that Mr Hawking would appreciate development in this area very much. Judging on how many problems male-female interactions are causing I think that a bit more sophisticated device helping to distinguish between 'ooohhh no no no' meaning 'please continue' or 'f.off or I call the police'. This said I must admit that knowing that somebody can evaluate your feelings if not thoughts may be spooky and may also be not for your benefit - I am thinking here about greedy corporations, criminals - normal and those in government, spying agencies, insurance companies (which are already not insurance companies but another tax authority with some limited utility attached to it) etc.
Maybe it is good that thought reading will not be very easy - Thinking processes are probably to dispersed and variable for the machines so that they would have to train even more and individually per brain. Development in this area gives us a little time to investigate the possible consequences for our society and what we think is beneficial. I am rather pessimistic on what will happen however. The hysteric 'think abut the children' crowd combined with 'cut his arm and perforate his anus - tough on crime' crowd together with general brainlessness of common folk will lead us there without preparation but with full speed - as the members of the dominating species do.
The most visible part were riots and there were times in London where these were happening with tiring regularity approx every 20y or so.
The whole thing about how evil humans are is true and at the same time untrue. Some basic regulations are needed so that people are not ripped off. If industry can survive only if they pay hunger wages then maybe it there is no reason for it to exist locally or some helping hand is needed, not necessarily in form of cheap credit or release from regulation but some industrial policy like the one Germans have would do something. OC for that one would need to have educated work force. BTW: Germans complain about missing hands on the floor all the time because people are not ready to work for money that are being offered. Seems to be the same story all over. What seems to have been working for England back then was that once one industry was not as profitable as it used to be a new one came around. The only unpleasant part were the hunger and riots on falling part of the curve.
Technically you can still outsource a plumber job to another company. I guess you meant offshoring not being really possible for plumbers and until technology does not replace that job completely this and lawyers stay a good option. Surely due to currently existing legal limitations one still needs lawyers in flesh standing in front of the judge. But research can be outsourced already.
I heard that Island is going to delegalize pr0n - could this act of law be considered a mutilation of innocent Island males then as it obviously affects their brains?
Bodies heavier than air cannot fly either.
revolt of the washing machines and peace on earth are bit more appropriate I think but in general the master had predicted quite some of the things that become reality.
I recall reading "The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate The World" in 2011 and thinking how this can evolve and what about things Morozov did not write, because he maybe did not know (or did not dare to write, being afraid of tin foil hat label etc). I have also an impression that in the world so small as ours (thanx to technology) some means of using the streams of data is needed anyway. Not only for terrorists but also for normal criminals. They use technology too and combating them in old fashion way is increasingly impossible. Checks and balances - that is the way to go. But then there are some tiny little problems, namely with democracy itself. We know now how silly it is to believe that our voices count - they do not. We may vote one asshole out of the office (not an easy feat but still possible) but what to do between elections? What about policies that we disagree with and which are anyway introduced?
Quite frankly, when I think about decisions our Great Leaders make (for the sake of democracy, human rights and their corporate friends), I have this sickening feeling of the past long gone - when for instance questions about discrepancies in party approved history books could mean no access to university (fortunately for me communism fell before this happened).
So there is a chance to get a low id number. I thought this site was a prank but if it still exists I may consider moving. OC the asshats that make any discussion impossible (like the ones discussing their dirty visions and Linus's weight gain here) may be tempted too, which is unfortunate.
This and your government already oppresses your and other people - so how your guns stopped that? Maybe I missed that in the news - I lately cannot stand all the shit that is being 'reported' - but organized militia regularly fails to show up, when people are killed while SWAT teams invade their homes. Somehow I have a feeling that if your militia did show up then it would have to be really well organized not to directly die in a storm of fire. Care to explain this?
in other words dealing with problems after they became real although one could see them coming is just silly.
I did stalk my first ex before I learned tha this is bad and spooky for the subject of stalking. I was just leaving flowers at her door. This in our old traditions was actually appreciated and a sigin of courtship. Today it means I am a perv. I am less and less convinced that societal development we see we can call progress. Some of that maybe - like less acceptance for violence against some group etc. But if that is bound with grand silliness then accepting that en block is just counter productive.
By nature big proportion of males have high interest in female bodies. If it were not so we would not be here to discuss that. Stop it and human kind dissapears. I do not mind all that much actually.
It is also a nice exercise to think about consequences of getting rid of male sex drive alltogether. It would be actually good to think about that before thinking about how to get there.... But then again that is my perverted brain. I am male after all.
I missed sarcasm and web2.0 too - stopped reading at the word starting wioth c and ending with loud. Not sure why.... Must be late hour or so because GGP post was actually worth reading in whole.
so we have truly unbiased and non-discriminatory society where built-in attributes like gender and race play no role. Fantastic news! Pity majority of us cannot even dream of socializing with this noble group of people....
so the aliens have been bombing mars and now we discuss precision of their meteoring mars so that our united space command can ask for funds to waste them on on not working deflections systems?
'when given opportunity' is a key phrase. Society that is by principle and openly hard on crime to keep children safe and all these other things, goes quite close to giving a hint that this i.e. treating others like trash will be tolerated behaviour. Add to this overcrowding and privatization of penal system and you get a perfect situation when the condition you stated is almost always true. It is in fact a wonder that terrible things do not happen more often.
sounds like the land of the free that the Grounding Fathers envisioned
There is always a way around the difficulties. I would imagine that a prison is in itself a terrible thing to be in, no need for torture and some such. There are people there that can be helped in form of taking medication, by showing how to control their anger. There are also others that can be corrected by the fact they have been caught already. There are still others, for whom no amount of correction will help, who see prison term as unfortunate period of time they have to serve and possibly shorten in any way available. You have all those people - no need to apply not tested drugs combination to execute people that possibly did not commit the crime they are dying for, or put into inhumane conditions for smoking a prism of #. If I understand this correctly you are arguing that any form of changing of the mind, however peaceful and voluntary, ultimately leads to scenarios Orwell described in 1984 or Borges in Clockwork Orange. That is simply not true and if terrible things happen there is a way for the society to improve on that.
The question is interesting tho - clockwork orange showed an example of such treatment too. Any meaningful behavioral therapy will make differences such that you may worry. I guess you have to trust somebody. Not everybody that is trying explicitly to change you is a criminal or worse - an evil asshole from some agency protecting us from something.
The situation complicates if the choice was between kids of somebody else and strangers but if strangers were not relevant to mine or kids survival they are doomed if I had to make a choice. You see the utility function is not what the master that invented it thought it was. The economists were dealing with illusion of understanding only to find out that what they were talking about is life of the non-existent creatures called econs instead of humans. In other words the utility analysis is just too simplified.
The interesting part is what you asked about yourself. You are most likely a geek (being here after all) and thus you evaluate your options with slow brain feature which means you rationalize things. This is a problem for the kids in this example because either you are a psychopath or have no kids on your own, IN later case you just do not see the immense effort put in kid's upbringing starting at the courtship to get the female, child bearing by its mother, care of a father about pregnant mother, and all others little things. Thus your assumption about value of some old farts in comparison of value of the kids is mistaken. This calculation may be different if you exchange the single choice for a complex one in which decision made now has impact on options available later. As in real life. These decision were made by numerous parents too - running away from coming armies of savages in a cold winter for instance make a family chose to leave first a grandpa then a pregnant wife than a kid only to ensure survival of at least some part of the family and thus an investment that has been made till now. These choice have been made actually and in Europe not that long time ago. Seems to be recurring part of our history... Coming back - there are situations in which a person that knows what parent and society invest in kids, will make a decision against kids but these are special, unfortunately not as special as not to exist at all.
correct. Coding has been difficult task for geniuses at the very beginning because of two reasons: price of equipment and difficulty of some of tasks at hand back at the time. These days almost enybody can do some coding - my kids learn scripting for office applications at school in 3rd grade - that is programming too. In my professional life I often deal with what you can call infrastructure projects where team size goes over 5persons and it cannot be squized in 3 months, usually having to work on existing code base and maintaining different versions of product in different phases of a life cycle.In such setups coding is a skill which requires quite some knowledge, it is just very important but minor thing - most of the time you deal with things that are not application coding but discussing architecture, ways of testing, release strategy, test automation strategy and some such. There are projects where teams refuse to deal with this issues in a structured way because they 'like coding' and ones where they accept that it is difficult to get done all these other things perfectly but it is nevertheless worthwhile as it saves some major stress later etc. In these setups coding is just part of project life but not the most important one. Testing or maintenance or any such thing is not part of any of the courses. It is still worthwhile as our office life is full of coding of some sort. It is a skill like (yes a car analogy!) car driving - most of us iin inustrilized world have a driving license and can drive but track bd bus drivers are still professionals with special license. The question is - do you want to be a track driver?
Yes CS degree can give you that and a recipe for snake oil too which together with a marketing course can make you rich in no time.