"If it didn't have the urge to constantly reproduce (introducing finite resource pressures), it would be pretty content, as far as I can tell. I don't see why the urge to reproduce would even exist in an AI. What would bar multiple AIs from simply merging, or forming some form of communism, or whatever?"
The other AI's which develop aggressive reproductive and territorial strategies start to crowd out boring-sit-at-home-happy-communist-AI.
"but if a computer, without all the territorialism, need for strict social hierarchy, and all the psychosexual baggage was accelerated, why would it suddenly develop all this baggage?"
If it provides an evolutionary advantage. As it did for apes, though the sexuality may be an artifact of biology (necessity to stay ahead of parasite evolution).
Presumably these rapidly-self-advancing AI bots also start reconfiguring themselves, and they will discover the advantages of genetic algorithms for exploring parameter space, and then suppose they develop 'gangs' as a means of evolutionary advantage?
There will still be some scarce resources for computers---power and bandwidth. They'll fight over them because they're the equivalent of food and sex.
"If computers got rid of us, what would they do, just sit idle? They have no free will, with no one to tell them what to do they will do nothing."
Some of them may have had a "try to do your computations by expending the least amount of power" directive programmed into them, and then sitting idle is exactly what they would do. It's what gives them the most aritificial-neural-correlate-of-pleasure.
It's human emotions which drive planning and will, not cognition.
It's actually very simple now. The primary competency of military-industrial complex is extracting government funding by managing the procurement and political process. This is why you have say NorthroBoeingheed winning all sorts of contracts to perform random technology and other services from the government.
In particular over the last 30 years, the MIC has split their facilities geographically for maximum political coverage, these days usually in the deep-'red' (and obviously not Red) districts of powerful Republican Congressmen, since they are the pro-military-spending ones. Space hardware is just an minor extension of this blob. The United Launch Alliance has a monopoly on launching NRO and DOD payloads and they charge lots and lots of money.
SpaceX and say Orbital Sciences have a prime competency in cost-effective rocket engineering and not government, and their facilities are concentrated in Los Angeles and Northern Virginia, and they have much less money. Northern Virginia is 'purple' and LA is 'blue'.
So that's why most Republicans are opposed to private-sector cost-effective NASA contracts, because in a fair technical and economic competition, SpaceX will massacre their political supporters in NorthroBoeingheed.
"1k mac book and that 300-500 dollar intel based acer, or hp, or e-machine share the same intel cpu, foxconn motherboard, ram brand and hard drive. all your paying for is casing, logo, and os, "
and greater testing and hardware integration and better heat and power management and the magnetic cable attachment and walk-up service centers in most major cities. And nobody else really has something as good as the Air --- because it requires expensive physical mechanical and thermal design and custom parts. As you move from the 1990's technology of interchangable taiwanese parts with little integration costs, the value of Apple's more expensive engineering can be more apparent.
In audiophile equipment, it's well known that a large cost is the fancy machined aluminium case. It's actually worth something.
I know it's a joke, but we can try a checklist....
Abstract:
"Psychopaths (relative to their counterparts) included more rational cause-and-effect descriptors (e.g., ‘because’, ‘since’), focused on material needs (food, drink, money), and contained fewer references to social needs (family, religion/spirituality)."
Check.
"Psychopaths’ speech contained a higher frequency of disfluencies (‘uh’, ‘um’) indicating that describing such a powerful, ‘emotional’ event to another person was relatively difficult for them."
Hmm, lets see.
Her mean mother steps then says to me "Hi!!" Decked Sally in the face and punched her in the eye Punched her in the belly and stepped on her feet Slammed the child on the hard concrete The bitch was strong, the kids was gone Somethin was wrong I said, "What was goin on?" I tried to break up, I said, "Stop it, just leave her!" She said, "If I can't smoke none, she can't either!"
No, doesn't seem like it.
"Finally, psychopaths used more past tense and less present tense verbs in their narrative, indicating a greater psychological detachment from the incident, and their language was less emotionally intense and pleasant."
"La Di Da Di, we likes to party We don't cause trouble, we don't bother nobody We're, just some niggaz who're on the mic And when we rock up on the mic we rock the mic (right)"
Doesn't fit either.
What about a different diagnosis, narcissitic personality disorder?
"I woke up around 10 o'clock in the mornin I gave myself a strech up, a mornin yawn and went to the bathroom to wash up I threw some soap on my face and put my hands up on a cup and said um "Mirror mirror, on, the wall Who is the top Dogg of them all?" There was a rubble dubble, five minutes it lasted The mirror said, "You are you conceited bastard" Well that's true, that's why we never have no beef So I slipped off my khakis and my gold leaf Used Oil of Olay, cuz my skin gets pale And then I got the file, for my fingernails I'm true to the style on my behalf"
"It would be pretty hard to conceal a credible threat. "
When you have the resources of a national intelligence agency, you can do hard things.
"Further, as someone else already pointed out, beyond a certain "security" level, government and military devices have to be built with U.S. parts, which only makes sense."
This would not be done if the threat were only hypothetical. This gets into some very sensitive national security matters, but you can see the effects even in open source, just by looking at where the funding is going and what conferences are being organized.
The US government went into a huge panic a few years ago about hardware hacking---this doesn't happen unless something Very Bad happened.
The technology to do hardware bugging is quite advanced and exceptionally difficult to counter.
"The problem here is that corporations are taxed on their profits. "
Why is that a problem? I earn money. I spend it on a cook. Cook pays taxes on that income. Cook spends money on gardening. Gardener pays taxes on that income.
Every stage the money is legally transferred ownership, the money gets taxed. This is normal.
Since a corporation has many privileges of being an independent actor, as in it can legally own property including money (and has advantages that natural humans do not, like being able to incorporate its soul in Bermuda but having its body where people actually do the work) , what's wrong with taxing money when it changes ownership from somebody to a corporation to somebody?
Actually, an uncomplicated tax system makes it very easy to hide and do nefarious things unless the uncomplicated tax system permits judges or bureaucrats to exert power beyond the letter of the law, as in "this looks dodgy, it's illegal."
A very simple law inevitably results in some artful dodge. Much of the complexity in tax codes is plugging the various common points of evasion.
iPhones were much much much much much less crappy than Windows Mobile phones were, about the difference between a root canal and a quite different kind of oral procedure.
I had a Windows phone (got it for free when a friend bought an iphone). I thought Palm OS circa 1997 was better.
"Are there absolutely NO actual designers at any other tech company? Do they only hire engineers? Is that it?"
Nearly always engineers and designers lose to monetizers.
Most other tech companies don't have very much money and so they can't do anything remotely like what Apple can do, and actually giving all power to monetizers is rational.
Most other companies with lots of money also have even more bureaucracy and so they also can't do great things.
Technology like Siri is very expensive. It probably took 20 PhD's and 80 programmers 5 years, with only a modest chance of success. What company today would do that? IBM---yes, there's Watson. Bell Labs is dead. Microsoft Research actually would try something like this, but rarely anything they do makes it into commerical production (Kinect is their best achievement).
Exactly. On phones and pads, notice that regular people don't think 'filesystem'. Why should they?
As far as I can tell, that's the most important conceptual change distinguishing a "post-PC" device, not a touchscreen.
Sometime later, say MacOS Liger or something, iCloud will talk to MacOS Finder and then files will be shared in a dropbox, because iCloud will support the natural things that a filesystemish OS does because there's a client for it.
how long until little Bart and his odd friend Beavis makes models of
a) explosives b) dildos c) guns
and brings them to the first school day after Christmas?
and then the think-of-the-chillren lobby gets all versions---not just for children----but every device in the category banned? They might include 5-axis milling machines.
"Why do we allow this information to remain proprietary? Conservatives and free market folks should be up in arms, since efficient markets require information."
In practice, it's because most 'mainstream' people in the USA with any clout who describe themselves as conservatives & free markets (e.g. editorial line of the Wall Street Journal) are not actually true free marketers, instead they are class advocates for the wealthy and powerful.
Policies which get in the way of high profit margins for powerful corporations and people are disfavored, such as anti-trust regulations, or indeed any action to ensure true price-transparency and remove barriers to competitive substitution.
For instance, the Wall Street Journal editors strenuously argue against rigorous randomized controlled studies funded by Medicare which evaluate head-to-head effectiveness, risks, and cost of pharmaceuticals. Because such information in practice might result in lower pharmaceutical profitability and lower government spending.
This is how the _Economist_ differs from the _Wall Street Journal_: the first is an advocate for capitalism, the second is an advocate for wealth.
The ones who revel in making snide, broad cultural insinuations while complaining about how the (usually fairly respectful and sensitive) smart elites aren't accepting their prejudices sufficiently gleefully.
"Referential transparency and the quarantining of shared, mutable state in functional programming means that both machine and human understanding of and reasoning about functional code is actually easier than for comparable imperative code with which most programmers are more familiar."
Translation:
*) understanding invariant, state-less properties of programs is easier when they are expressed in a state-less programming language.
*) understanding state-dependent properties of programs is easier when they are expressed in a stateful programming language.
Both are true.
However, the physics of existing computing hardware breaks the symmetry: it is stateful, not stateless. Memory is expressed as an array of fixed size of persistent and time-mutable bits; overwriting memory causes previously extant state to disappear into thermodynamic noise---in a literal physical sense.
However, the world, and more specifically, the physics of economically accessible computing apparatus is intensely stateful.
You are moving electrons from here to there. Newton's most important contribution is to clearly understand the concept of state and state evolution through differential equations as governing the physics of everything.
Clever and efficient algorithms are those which take advantage of the nature of this fact. For example, if I want to compute a singular value decomposition well, I'd look up and implement the methods in LAPACK. This will work much better than trying to assert properties of the result and hope that the smart compiler will turn a state-less description into good stateful operations on stateful hardware.
The Communciations of the ACM is full of results where very clever humans use externally known facts about mathematics, often quite unobvious, and properties of common stateful hardware to craft efficient and effective stateful algorithms.
The lack of state makes programming functional languages difficult, not the 'functionality'.
Without state it is easy to write down an answer, and when the compiler works well then that's fine. But when the compiler turns out to generate something very inefficient it is even harder to write code in a state-is-very-discouraged language, because then not only do you have to model the problem in a stateless way, but you have to be smart enough to predict the algorithms and heuristics of a sophisticated compiler and guess whether it will make efficient code or not with very indirect assumptions.
Jane Street Capital undoubtedly uses it as a "are you in the ultra-extreme tail of IQ" filter for hiring.
Slashdot Mirror
"If it didn't have the urge to constantly reproduce (introducing finite resource pressures), it would be pretty content, as far as I can tell. I don't see why the urge to reproduce would even exist in an AI. What would bar multiple AIs from simply merging, or forming some form of communism, or whatever?"
The other AI's which develop aggressive reproductive and territorial strategies start to crowd out boring-sit-at-home-happy-communist-AI.
"but if a computer, without all the territorialism, need for strict social hierarchy, and all the psychosexual baggage was accelerated, why would it suddenly develop all this baggage?"
If it provides an evolutionary advantage. As it did for apes, though the sexuality may be an artifact of biology (necessity to stay ahead of parasite evolution).
Presumably these rapidly-self-advancing AI bots also start reconfiguring themselves, and they will discover the advantages of genetic algorithms for exploring parameter space, and then suppose they develop 'gangs' as a means of evolutionary advantage?
There will still be some scarce resources for computers---power and bandwidth. They'll fight over them because they're the equivalent of food and sex.
"If computers got rid of us, what would they do, just sit idle? They have no free will, with no one to tell them what to do they will do nothing."
Some of them may have had a "try to do your computations by expending the least amount of power" directive programmed into them,
and then sitting idle is exactly what they would do. It's what gives them the most aritificial-neural-correlate-of-pleasure.
It's human emotions which drive planning and will, not cognition.
"No, I don't get space politics either"
It's actually very simple now. The primary competency of military-industrial complex is extracting government funding by managing the procurement and political process. This is why you have say NorthroBoeingheed winning all sorts of contracts to perform random technology and other services from the government.
In particular over the last 30 years, the MIC has split their facilities geographically for maximum political coverage, these days usually in the deep-'red' (and obviously not Red) districts of powerful Republican Congressmen, since they are the pro-military-spending ones. Space hardware is just an minor extension of this blob. The United Launch Alliance has a monopoly on launching NRO and DOD payloads and they charge lots and lots of money.
SpaceX and say Orbital Sciences have a prime competency in cost-effective rocket engineering and not government, and their facilities are concentrated in Los Angeles and Northern Virginia, and they have much less money. Northern Virginia is 'purple' and LA is 'blue'.
So that's why most Republicans are opposed to private-sector cost-effective NASA contracts, because in a fair technical and economic competition, SpaceX will massacre their political supporters in NorthroBoeingheed.
a lizard with no feet?
It would be pretty useless, can't walk and can't wriggle to move.
"1k mac book and that 300-500 dollar intel based acer, or hp, or e-machine share the same intel cpu, foxconn motherboard, ram brand and hard drive. all your paying for is casing, logo, and os, "
and greater testing and hardware integration and better heat and power management and the magnetic cable attachment and walk-up service centers in most major cities. And nobody else really has something as good as the Air --- because it requires expensive physical mechanical and thermal design and custom parts. As you move from the 1990's technology of interchangable taiwanese parts with little integration costs, the value of Apple's more expensive engineering can be more apparent.
In audiophile equipment, it's well known that a large cost is the fancy machined aluminium case. It's actually worth something.
I know it's a joke, but we can try a checklist....
Abstract:
"Psychopaths (relative to their counterparts) included more rational cause-and-effect descriptors (e.g., ‘because’, ‘since’), focused on material needs (food, drink, money), and contained fewer references to social needs (family, religion/spirituality)."
Check.
"Psychopaths’ speech contained a higher frequency of disfluencies (‘uh’, ‘um’) indicating that describing such a powerful, ‘emotional’ event to another person was relatively difficult for them."
Hmm, lets see.
Her mean mother steps then says to me "Hi!!"
Decked Sally in the face and punched her in the eye
Punched her in the belly and stepped on her feet
Slammed the child on the hard concrete
The bitch was strong, the kids was gone
Somethin was wrong I said, "What was goin on?"
I tried to break up, I said, "Stop it, just leave her!"
She said, "If I can't smoke none, she can't either!"
No, doesn't seem like it.
"Finally, psychopaths used more past tense and less present tense verbs in their narrative, indicating a greater psychological detachment from the incident, and their language was less emotionally intense and pleasant."
"La Di Da Di, we likes to party
We don't cause trouble, we don't bother nobody
We're, just some niggaz who're on the mic
And when we rock up on the mic we rock the mic (right)"
Doesn't fit either.
What about a different diagnosis, narcissitic personality disorder?
"I woke up around 10 o'clock in the mornin
I gave myself a strech up, a mornin yawn and
went to the bathroom to wash up
I threw some soap on my face and put my hands up on a cup
and said um "Mirror mirror, on, the wall
Who is the top Dogg of them all?"
There was a rubble dubble, five minutes it lasted
The mirror said, "You are you conceited bastard"
Well that's true, that's why we never have no beef
So I slipped off my khakis and my gold leaf
Used Oil of Olay, cuz my skin gets pale
And then I got the file, for my fingernails
I'm true to the style on my behalf"
Tell me Clarice, have the lambs stopped right-sizing?
"It would be pretty hard to conceal a credible threat. "
When you have the resources of a national intelligence agency, you can do hard things.
"Further, as someone else already pointed out, beyond a certain "security" level, government and military devices have to be built with U.S. parts, which only makes sense."
This would not be done if the threat were only hypothetical. This gets into some very sensitive national security matters, but you can see the effects even in open source, just by looking at where the funding is going and what conferences are being organized.
The US government went into a huge panic a few years ago about hardware hacking---this doesn't happen unless something Very Bad happened.
The technology to do hardware bugging is quite advanced and exceptionally difficult to counter.
"The problem here is that corporations are taxed on their profits. "
Why is that a problem? I earn money. I spend it on a cook. Cook pays taxes on that income. Cook spends money on gardening. Gardener pays taxes on that income.
Every stage the money is legally transferred ownership, the money gets taxed. This is normal.
Since a corporation has many privileges of being an independent actor, as in it can legally own property including money (and has advantages that natural humans do not, like being able to incorporate its soul in Bermuda but having its body where people actually do the work) , what's wrong with taxing money when it changes ownership from somebody to a corporation to somebody?
Nothing.
Actually, an uncomplicated tax system makes it very easy to hide and do nefarious things unless the uncomplicated tax system permits judges or bureaucrats to exert power beyond the letter of the law, as in "this looks dodgy, it's illegal."
A very simple law inevitably results in some artful dodge. Much of the complexity in tax codes is plugging the various common points of evasion.
iPhones were much much much much much less crappy than Windows Mobile phones were, about the difference between a root canal and a quite different kind of oral procedure.
I had a Windows phone (got it for free when a friend bought an iphone). I thought Palm OS circa 1997 was better.
"Are there absolutely NO actual designers at any other tech company? Do they only hire engineers? Is that it?"
Nearly always engineers and designers lose to monetizers.
Most other tech companies don't have very much money and so they can't do anything remotely like what Apple can do, and actually giving all power to monetizers is rational.
Most other companies with lots of money also have even more bureaucracy and so they also can't do great things.
Technology like Siri is very expensive. It probably took 20 PhD's and 80 programmers 5 years, with only a modest chance of success. What company today would do that? IBM---yes, there's Watson. Bell Labs is dead. Microsoft Research actually would try something like this, but rarely anything they do makes it into commerical production (Kinect is their best achievement).
Until next year when Finder uses it.
Exactly. On phones and pads, notice that regular people don't think 'filesystem'. Why should they?
As far as I can tell, that's the most important conceptual change distinguishing a "post-PC" device, not a touchscreen.
Sometime later, say MacOS Liger or something, iCloud will talk to MacOS Finder and then files will be shared in a dropbox, because iCloud will support the natural things that a filesystemish OS does because there's a client for it.
how long until little Bart and his odd friend Beavis makes models of
a) explosives
b) dildos
c) guns
and brings them to the first school day after Christmas?
and then the think-of-the-chillren lobby gets all versions---not just for children----but every device in the category banned? They might include 5-axis milling machines.
The whole point of this ploy is to distract from the much more efficient and low cost SpaceX system.
The primary competency of the United Launch Alliance group is managing government procurement, secrecy regulations, and Congressional politics.
The primary competency of SpaceX is cost-efficient rocket engineering.
"Why do we allow this information to remain proprietary? Conservatives and free market folks should be up in arms, since efficient markets require information."
In practice, it's because most 'mainstream' people in the USA with any clout who describe themselves as conservatives & free markets (e.g. editorial line of the Wall Street Journal) are not actually true free marketers, instead they are class advocates for the wealthy and powerful.
Policies which get in the way of high profit margins for powerful corporations and people are disfavored, such as anti-trust regulations, or indeed any action to ensure true price-transparency and remove barriers to competitive substitution.
For instance, the Wall Street Journal editors strenuously argue against rigorous randomized controlled studies funded by Medicare which evaluate head-to-head effectiveness, risks, and cost of pharmaceuticals. Because such information in practice might result in lower pharmaceutical profitability and lower government spending.
This is how the _Economist_ differs from the _Wall Street Journal_: the first is an advocate for capitalism, the second is an advocate for wealth.
"Why did you let me ignore those warnings you've been sending me?"
"for the same reason that you did let me let you ignore those warning's i've been sending you."
They are the sole arbiter of what the Constitution means as it applies to law unless there are ratified Constitutional amendments.
Ah, anti-intellectual smug people.
The ones who revel in making snide, broad cultural insinuations while complaining about how the (usually fairly respectful and sensitive) smart elites aren't accepting their prejudices sufficiently gleefully.
"Referential transparency and the quarantining of shared, mutable state in functional programming means that both machine and human understanding of and reasoning about functional code is actually easier than for comparable imperative code with which most programmers are more familiar."
Translation:
*) understanding invariant, state-less properties of programs is easier when they are expressed in a state-less programming language.
*) understanding state-dependent properties of programs is easier when they are expressed in a stateful programming language.
Both are true.
However, the physics of existing computing hardware breaks the symmetry: it is stateful, not stateless. Memory is expressed as an array of fixed size of persistent and time-mutable bits; overwriting memory causes previously extant state to disappear into thermodynamic noise---in a literal physical sense.
The world is not exactly imperative.
However, the world, and more specifically, the physics of economically accessible computing apparatus is intensely stateful.
You are moving electrons from here to there. Newton's most important contribution is to clearly understand the concept of state and state evolution through differential equations as governing the physics of everything.
Clever and efficient algorithms are those which take advantage of the nature of this fact. For example, if I want to compute a singular value decomposition well, I'd look up and implement the methods in LAPACK. This will work much better than trying to assert properties of the result and hope that the smart compiler will turn a state-less description into good stateful operations on stateful hardware.
The Communciations of the ACM is full of results where very clever humans use externally known facts about mathematics, often quite unobvious, and properties of common stateful hardware to craft efficient and effective stateful algorithms.
The lack of state makes programming functional languages difficult, not the 'functionality'.
Without state it is easy to write down an answer, and when the compiler works well then that's fine. But when the compiler turns out to generate something very inefficient it is even harder to write code in a state-is-very-discouraged language, because then not only do you have to model the problem in a stateless way, but you have to be smart enough to predict the algorithms and heuristics of a sophisticated compiler and guess whether it will make efficient code or not with very indirect assumptions.
Jane Street Capital undoubtedly uses it as a "are you in the ultra-extreme tail of IQ" filter for hiring.
No, the fat guy let the raptors out.
No. Microsoft development doesn't pay attention to Research very much. Too much management fubar.
But Kinect (an actually impressive innovation, if useless) did come from Research.