OT: Various Off-topic topics (WAS: Kudos to Oliver)
Very interesting post Roedy. Just playing a bit of devils advocate to
promote discussion:
"Roedy Green" <my_email_is_posted_on_my_website@munged.invalid> wrote in
message news:17ev42h3r1otr883pucv0nje3hph078ntc@4ax.com...
On 26 Apr 2006 07:18:51 -0700, "Arvind" <asrinivasan@worldbank.org>
wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :
Roedy seems to be on thanksgiving spree ;) ?
In 1985 a sold everything I owned including my fully paid for
4-bedroom house to raise money to help out the famine victims in
Ethiopia. It was a heady time. I hosted a telethon that raised $2
million. One of the amusing things about that time was I got a letter
from Mother Theresa's lawyer. I had said on the air "Many people
don't like donating because they don't trust the charity. Well then,
give it to Mother Theresa. Do you seriously think she is on the take?"
Mother T. strictly forbade anyone soliciting donations on her behalf.
My generosity has never come near that level since.
There's some controversy regarding Mother Theresa, and what her order
spends the money it receives via donations on. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Theresa#Controversy and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionaries_of_Charity
Of course there is the risk they
[our AI overlords]
would have their own agenda, as
humans would appear to them like doddering parents with Alzheimer's,
perhaps best euthanised. But more likely humans will be retrofitted
like Borg with cyber implants to bring them up to snuff to
participate, intimately hooked with global communications of such high
bandwidth it would be come a sort of technologically induced cosmic
consciousness. The boundaries between people would blur. Your
problems become my problems. I can perceive your reality and your
problems just as keenly as my own. Watch the effect cell phones on
the young. They are Borg-like in their hive mentality needing constant
inane chatter to maintain a sense of security.
Is this (the comparison to young people with cellphones) supposed to be
an argument FOR accepting our new AI overlords, or for fighting AGAINST
them? There's also a significant portion of the human population who feel
that computers lack certain qualities that are desirable in humans (e.g.
emotions). There are plenty of dramas in which the hero(ine) concludes "I
may have made a mistake, but at least I made it while in love." To them,
having the computers make us more like them would be a step backwards.
There are also arguments (even among technologists) against having a
mono-culture. With this massively networked cosmic consciousness, a virus
(in the form of a computer trojan, or a biological mental illness), could be
devastating.
I like the idea of being "connected" (as portrayed in, for example the
film "Ghost in the Shell" and its sequel), but I'd also like to maintain my
individuality.
[...]
Java looked like the most promising hot bed. Because it was free and
widely available on many platforms it was suitable for the third
world which would be bringing a massive amount of new intelligence
onboard with people willing to think out the box since they would for
the most part be self-taught. It has a strong international flavour
which suits my global co-operation bent.
After reading the Borg description above, the "Java is Everywhere" video
recently posted in c.l.j.advocacy takes on a new meaning.
[...]
We only want to look at one problem at a time, and it
is invariably the one that appeared today -- no matter how unimportant
in the grand scheme of things it is. Note for example how FOX
headlines on the Seattle news are all about graffiti. That is a great
survival strategy for a hunter gatherer, not for a species teraforming
the planet to a wasteland.
On the other hand, is the survival of our species, our planet, or this
sector of the galaxy even all that important, in the very grandest scheme of
things (i.e. on the order of the universe, or all of existence)? The only
thing I can think of which would make us unique in the universe is if by
some twist of fate, we happened to be the only sentient life form that
exists. And if that were the case, there wouldn't be anyone else around to
admire our uniqueness anyway.
If you think I am talking science fiction about computers being
smarter than humans, have a look at Ray Kurzweil, the inventor of OCR
and the Kurzweil Synthesiser.
I find CAPTCHA tests (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha) these days
are really getting difficult. It took me a while to realize what looked like
"BCREQ+" was actually "BURWT"; the test was rotating every second letter 90
degrees clockwise, though obviously it didn't reveal this anywhere, and it
was up to me to figure this out. Lucky the 'T' was in there, or else I might
never have managed to sign up my account. I wonder if the increasing
difficulty of CAPTCHA is an indication that our OCR AI is getting better and
better (or are web administrators just getting more and more paranoid?)
[...]
Even back in the 70s I developed software smarter than humans at
designing high voltage transmission lines. It will come in fits and
starts. One of the big ones coming soon is driving vehicles faster and
more safely than humans can.
There are a few tasks that computers are much "smarter" than humans at.
Calculations and memorizing stuff are some obvious ones. Detecting compile
errors within source code, solving sudokus, and perhaps passing CAPTCHA
tests are less obvious ones. However, there are some tasks for which it
seems humans are way better suited.
Natural language processing is the big one. It'll be a very long time
before you can tell a computer what you want in plain English and have it
understand what you mean. There's a contest called the "Loebner Prize" in
which people compete to write the most convincing chatter bot (i.e. an AI
program whose sole purpose is to provide an entertaining or stimulating
conversation with humans) held every year. You can download and run the
entries on your own computer to see that we've got a very, very, very long
way to go before we get anywhere near the way robots are portrayed in most
scifi movies (e.g. "The Terminator", "I, Robot", "2001: A space Odyssey",
etc.) http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html
Computer vision is another one. OCR is a subcategory of this, and we're
doing decently at it it seems (though the commercial OCR applications I've
used still make errors which I, as a human, would not have), but vision in
general is relatively poor. AI still has, for example, constructing a 3D
model of an object given a picture of it from various angles, or for
navigating a robot body around a physical maze without bumping into walls.
- Oliver