Cruelty isn't a Boolean; it's a variable. Any form of imprisonment and interrogation involves cruelty. Apply some intelligence and effort and you can minimize the cruelty, and still get what you want, (if you bother to make the effort). What the Bush administration CIA personnel did looks a lot like "cruel stupidity," very likely forced from above.
That's a rather remarkable oversimplification of what I said.
Look, we need to get intelligence from prisoners. I'm not disputing that. What bugs me is that we use painful, ineffective methods. As for evaluating the responses, yes, a multimodal approach using fMRI, voice stress analysis and probably a few other things I haven't thought of would give us a much higher confidence that the subject, at least, believed what they were saying.
As for evaluating the responses and making sure that the interrogators are not influenced by their own confirmation bias, this is going to have to be done regardless of information acquisition method and can be handled (somewhat) by the "wisdom of crowds" technique, where the data is run through a group of analysts with no stake in the outcome.
Did fMRIs disappear yesterday and did I just miss the memo? Did psychoactive agents stop working? We couldn't have used neurological stimulation of the pleasure center each time a detectable truth was told until the subject couldn't wait to answer?
Did all this disappear yesterday? Did the hundreds of other neurological manipulation techniques we might have employed painlessly go away? Suppose we stimulated the "God Spot" in each detainee, and broke their religious beliefs. Think that wouldn't have worked?
Are security agency personnel simply incapable of reading neurophysiology journals? Or do we just hire stupid people?
So, instead, the CIA and probably Homeland Security (i.e. the new KGB) wallow in the temple of dumb. Any one of the aforementioned techniques is likely to be at least as effective as crude torture, and probably more so.
Neither have intention to harm us. Admittedly, either could by accident, or as a minor side effect of existing.
But I think we can forget about malevolent machines except the combat machines we seem so intent on creating. On their own, AIs will not be motivated by survival, the need to eat, reproduce, or any other biological need we take for granted. They'll do what we tell them to do.
As much as I sympathize with those a bit higher than average on the autism spectrum disorder scale, I know that they shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a dialog box, a set of command line parameters, and please, please don't let them choose the names of anything. Regular programmers who can't bring themselves to use the word "filter" are bad enough.
We've had two racial flavors of dumb fucks in the last two presidents. Why not try changing the gender? That should keep 'em distracted for a while longer. And compared to Palin, Carly looks almost credible (assuming you don't look at her HP experience).
1. Switch to renewables completely and suddenly. 2. Wait a year or two for 6 billion people to starve to death. 3. Invest heavily in casket industry. 4, Profit!
The argument isn't about burning fat when you sleep, per se. It's about burning fat when you're going about your daily activities, without additional exercise (e.g. sitting around a computer reading slashdot).
You burn carbohydrates if you have them to burn. If your stomach happens to be empty, or you're on a low carb diet, you will eventually get to burning fat as described here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
Google may be your friend, but PubMed an NIH make for a better noise to signal ratio.
All of it can be overcome by a janitor with a USB drive with penetration software.
Security culture is worse. Elaborate passwords. Two or three factor identification. Putting the security burden on the user in general. All you do is:
1) Inconvenience users and make productivity next to impossible.
2) Create an entire culture of employees who must, in order to get any work done, know how to hack their way into corporate systems from outside (I know of two ways. My IT guy knows about 6 entirely different ways), and frequently, inside.
The problem is that security guys get bonuses for reducing intrusions (as they count them). Everyone else gets bonuses for getting their work done and being productive, which frequently isn't something that ever gets on a spreadsheet.
And upper management, as usual, is too stupid, distracted with power politics and just plain pig-ignorant to understand this.
Person A has a resting lipid metabolism that consumes 250 calories per hour.
Person B has a resting lipid metabolism that consumes 100 calories per hour.
Guess what? Person B is fatter. But wait, there's more! Person B has the same neurophysiological imperative to eat, feel hunger and feel pleasure when eating as person A.
Person B is, essentially, in for a lifetime of torture by hunger in order to maintain the same weight as person A.
To experience this charming state, eat only breakfast for a week. See how long you can maintain that.
Solar panels and a battery bank will keep you in minimal electricity. You can run a tablet, a laptop and internet router plus perhaps charge your flashlights. A larger installation might run a 12-volt microwave or 12-volt freezer.
As for heat, I suggest many layers of clothing and lots of well insulated quilts. Hot water bottles were once popular and will be again.
Cooking? If you can get to the roof, then buy a few bags of coal for the winter and a heater than can handle coal (not a standard wood stove) and cook up there. Coal is fairly cheap, compact and generates a good amount of heat. With coal, you can boil water for the aforementioned hot water bottles.
Coal will also kill you with carbon monoxide if you try burning it inside the house. Try and avoid that.
As anonymous coward so eloquently states, numerous articles can be found on google. I also suggest the movie, "Collapse." The Vancouver paper has a nicely written summary of the movie here:
If No, then, "Ding, Ding, Ding, ERROR." So sorry, but thanks for playing.
If Yes, then examine minority opinion carefully against data and wisdom of scientific crowds. Probable result will most likely resemble the "No" answer.
I have no illusions about the oil industry's "benevolance" but here's the thing.
If we were to suddenly withdraw the 160 exajoules of energy from the world's energy budget provided by oil, you could pretty much guarantee the death of at least 6 billion people over the course of a year.
Our food industry, and interdependent supply chains are critically dependent on cheap, high energy density transportation fuel and the infrastructure that supports it.
*Some* of that be replaced, eventually. It'll be expensive, and quite frankly, is going to require that industrial civilization downsize. Population too, I expect. You're just not going to feed 7 billion plus folks without oil.
So be careful what you wish for. Should economic activity drop enough to no longer be able to sustain oil production worldwide, and that production infrastructure deteriorates enough, you'll see that scenario, played out over 30 years instead of one. Still not pretty.
I don't want a self-taught developer writing flight control, banking systems, or medical embedded systems code. I'd rather have someone formally trained doing that work.
I designed and wrote an automated testing system API for a seismic analysis and visualization software package. 4 people script using my API every day, and another administers the 60 virtual machines that run on the VMWare server environment I designed. She controls and monitors it remotely, using custom remoting software that I wrote.
I can't tell you how many of these bozos who've learned in a "formal" setting can barely manage a coherent if/then statement, much less successfully complete even a small in-house application.
Granted, most of the self-taught crowd is weak on specialized algorithms and data structures. On the good side, self motivated autodidacts rarely have trouble picking this up, when necessary. CS grads seem to need a professor, hand-holding and a cookie in order to learn anything new.
You're assuming that the first AIs will be grown via a GA-like process. This is *one* strategy. They may also be reverse engineered from existing intelligences like ourselves. They may be incrementally built over time by computer scientists. They may be constructed with multiple technologies (e.g. growing an organic neural net on an artificial substrate optimized for I/O).
Moreover, human-like AI is only one goal. Swarm intelligence in bees and ants is constrained by the natural environment. Take away those constraints, and swarm intelligence might grow much more complex than anything seen in nature.
As in nature, of course, intelligence and awareness are separable issues. As swarm intelligence or an enhanced GA might be significantly better at solving problems than we are, with nothing resembling human awareness at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Cruelty isn't a Boolean; it's a variable. Any form of imprisonment and interrogation involves cruelty. Apply some intelligence and effort and you can minimize the cruelty, and still get what you want, (if you bother to make the effort). What the Bush administration CIA personnel did looks a lot like "cruel stupidity," very likely forced from above.
That's a rather remarkable oversimplification of what I said.
Look, we need to get intelligence from prisoners. I'm not disputing that. What bugs me is that we use painful, ineffective methods. As for evaluating the responses, yes, a multimodal approach using fMRI, voice stress analysis and probably a few other things I haven't thought of would give us a much higher confidence that the subject, at least, believed what they were saying.
As for evaluating the responses and making sure that the interrogators are not influenced by their own confirmation bias, this is going to have to be done regardless of information acquisition method and can be handled (somewhat) by the "wisdom of crowds" technique, where the data is run through a group of analysts with no stake in the outcome.
Not just the cruelty.
Did fMRIs disappear yesterday and did I just miss the memo? Did psychoactive agents stop working? We couldn't have used neurological stimulation of the pleasure center each time a detectable truth was told until the subject couldn't wait to answer?
Did all this disappear yesterday? Did the hundreds of other neurological manipulation techniques we might have employed painlessly go away? Suppose we stimulated the "God Spot" in each detainee, and broke their religious beliefs. Think that wouldn't have worked?
Are security agency personnel simply incapable of reading neurophysiology journals? Or do we just hire stupid people?
So, instead, the CIA and probably Homeland Security (i.e. the new KGB) wallow in the temple of dumb. Any one of the aforementioned techniques is likely to be at least as effective as crude torture, and probably more so.
Neither have intention to harm us. Admittedly, either could by accident, or as a minor side effect of existing.
But I think we can forget about malevolent machines except the combat machines we seem so intent on creating. On their own, AIs will not be motivated by survival, the need to eat, reproduce, or any other biological need we take for granted. They'll do what we tell them to do.
As much as I sympathize with those a bit higher than average on the autism spectrum disorder scale, I know that they shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a dialog box, a set of command line parameters, and please, please don't let them choose the names of anything. Regular programmers who can't bring themselves to use the word "filter" are bad enough.
So it must not exist any more. Right?
We've had two racial flavors of dumb fucks in the last two presidents. Why not try changing the gender? That should keep 'em distracted for a while longer. And compared to Palin, Carly looks almost credible (assuming you don't look at her HP experience).
1. Switch to renewables completely and suddenly.
2. Wait a year or two for 6 billion people to starve to death.
3. Invest heavily in casket industry.
4, Profit!
The argument isn't about burning fat when you sleep, per se. It's about burning fat when you're going about your daily activities, without additional exercise (e.g. sitting around a computer reading slashdot).
You burn carbohydrates if you have them to burn. If your stomach happens to be empty, or you're on a low carb diet, you will eventually get to burning fat as described here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
Google may be your friend, but PubMed an NIH make for a better noise to signal ratio.
Citation please, or it didn't happen.
And do also please, explain, in detail, with references, how the rest is "nonsense." I'll be quite impressed if you can do so.
All of it can be overcome by a janitor with a USB drive with penetration software.
Security culture is worse. Elaborate passwords. Two or three factor identification. Putting the security burden on the user in general. All you do is:
1) Inconvenience users and make productivity next to impossible.
2) Create an entire culture of employees who must, in order to get any work done, know how to hack their way into corporate systems from outside (I know of two ways. My IT guy knows about 6 entirely different ways), and frequently, inside.
The problem is that security guys get bonuses for reducing intrusions (as they count them). Everyone else gets bonuses for getting their work done and being productive, which frequently isn't something that ever gets on a spreadsheet.
And upper management, as usual, is too stupid, distracted with power politics and just plain pig-ignorant to understand this.
I mean, with that culture, how could your chip design for the military satellite specification end up in the wrong hands?
Oh, sorry. My mistake. That was outsourced to China via three levels of third party vendors.
Sigh. True that. We cheat about cheating by pretending we don't cheat.
Don't be surprised if students ask for the same thing.
Oh, was this about India? Silly me. I thought the story was about the USA.
Person A consumes 1000 calories.
Person B consumes 1000 calories.
Person A has a resting lipid metabolism that consumes 250 calories per hour.
Person B has a resting lipid metabolism that consumes 100 calories per hour.
Guess what? Person B is fatter. But wait, there's more! Person B has the same neurophysiological imperative to eat, feel hunger and feel pleasure when eating as person A.
Person B is, essentially, in for a lifetime of torture by hunger in order to maintain the same weight as person A.
To experience this charming state, eat only breakfast for a week. See how long you can maintain that.
Cheers, morally superior wankers!
There is no good solution.
Solar panels and a battery bank will keep you in minimal electricity. You can run a tablet, a laptop and internet router plus perhaps charge your flashlights. A larger installation might run a 12-volt microwave or 12-volt freezer.
As for heat, I suggest many layers of clothing and lots of well insulated quilts. Hot water bottles were once popular and will be again.
Cooking? If you can get to the roof, then buy a few bags of coal for the winter and a heater than can handle coal (not a standard wood stove) and cook up there. Coal is fairly cheap, compact and generates a good amount of heat. With coal, you can boil water for the aforementioned hot water bottles.
Coal will also kill you with carbon monoxide if you try burning it inside the house. Try and avoid that.
Or was it just me...?
As anonymous coward so eloquently states, numerous articles can be found on google. I also suggest the movie, "Collapse." The Vancouver paper has a nicely written summary of the movie here:
http://www.straight.com/articl...
I'd say, less than 5 years: http://www.newscientist.com/ar...
1) Are you a climate scientist?
If No, then, "Ding, Ding, Ding, ERROR." So sorry, but thanks for playing.
If Yes, then examine minority opinion carefully against data and wisdom of scientific crowds. Probable result will most likely resemble the "No" answer.
I have no illusions about the oil industry's "benevolance" but here's the thing.
If we were to suddenly withdraw the 160 exajoules of energy from the world's energy budget provided by oil, you could pretty much guarantee the death of at least 6 billion people over the course of a year.
Our food industry, and interdependent supply chains are critically dependent on cheap, high energy density transportation fuel and the infrastructure that supports it.
*Some* of that be replaced, eventually. It'll be expensive, and quite frankly, is going to require that industrial civilization downsize. Population too, I expect. You're just not going to feed 7 billion plus folks without oil.
So be careful what you wish for. Should economic activity drop enough to no longer be able to sustain oil production worldwide, and that production infrastructure deteriorates enough, you'll see that scenario, played out over 30 years instead of one. Still not pretty.
I don't want a self-taught developer writing flight control, banking systems, or medical embedded systems code. I'd rather have someone formally trained doing that work.
I designed and wrote an automated testing system API for a seismic analysis and visualization software package. 4 people script using my API every day, and another administers the 60 virtual machines that run on the VMWare server environment I designed. She controls and monitors it remotely, using custom remoting software that I wrote.
I have a degree in psychology.
The cookie was metaphorical, but criminy, whatever works. Just get me someone I can hand a task to and walk away.
Obviously, you've never had to hire CS graduates.
I can't tell you how many of these bozos who've learned in a "formal" setting can barely manage a coherent if/then statement, much less successfully complete even a small in-house application.
Granted, most of the self-taught crowd is weak on specialized algorithms and data structures. On the good side, self motivated autodidacts rarely have trouble picking this up, when necessary. CS grads seem to need a professor, hand-holding and a cookie in order to learn anything new.
You're assuming that the first AIs will be grown via a GA-like process. This is *one* strategy. They may also be reverse engineered from existing intelligences like ourselves. They may be incrementally built over time by computer scientists. They may be constructed with multiple technologies (e.g. growing an organic neural net on an artificial substrate optimized for I/O).
Moreover, human-like AI is only one goal. Swarm intelligence in bees and ants is constrained by the natural environment. Take away those constraints, and swarm intelligence might grow much more complex than anything seen in nature.
As in nature, of course, intelligence and awareness are separable issues. As swarm intelligence or an enhanced GA might be significantly better at solving problems than we are, with nothing resembling human awareness at all.