# Artificial intelligence: Threat or promise?



## KenOC

Strange Magic just posted an old and very short story by Fredric Brown, _Answer_. A new and powerful intergalactic computer declares itself God, and there's little that can be done about it. That was in 1954.

The whole issue is becoming more current with the dispute over AI. Some industry leaders see it as a boon, others (Stephen Hawking for instance) as an existential threat to mankind's very existence. The debate continues as the science of machine thinking continues to advance irregardless. Example:

A world championship chess match is now being fought between Magnus Carlsen of Norway, 27, defending his crown from Fabiano Caruana of the U.S., 26. Oliver Roeder of 538 is following the games and notes that his computer program showed a guaranteed checkmate for Caruana in today's midgame 20 moves out, if only Caruana could make the required play. Sadly, no human player can look 20 moves out. The game ended in a draw.

And recently, a computer that had trained itself defeated the world's strongest go player in a standard tournament. Go is considered much harder than chess from a programming standpoint.

So when do computers become self-aware? Or is that even required for them to have suzerainty over us mere humans? Already machines tell us when to get up in the morning (and we'd darn well better do it), when to drive our cars and when to stop for cross traffic. They inform on us to authorities: where and when we spend money, what we spend it on, how reliably we pay our bills, what our banking transactions are, and a hundred other things. Even here on Talk Classical, machines keep track of our Chinese-style social credit scores for inspection by our _éminence grise_ moderators, determining when we are to be shunned and for how long.

Is the age of the machine a distant danger, or is it already here? What do you think?


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## Larkenfield

So when do computers become self-aware?

I doubt if they will become truly self-aware, ever. They can only work on the basis of logic and the analysis of past experience, but not on the basis of instinct and intuition. It’s intuition that does not always work on the basis of logic and in fact can even go counter to logic based upon an inner human revelation that can come up with the right answer to a complex problem that defies explanation. That kind of an answer is not necessarily based on knowledge. Intuition can go beyond knowledge and it’s an instinct and a gut reaction that AI computers will never have. Humankind’s reliance on logic and knowledge as the answer to everything, as if it’ll solve every human problem, is perhaps the biggest folly of all. But knowledge as a solver of certain practical problems does have value, like turning the lights off and on as a convenience, perhaps aid in diagnosing physical problems—or so I see the usefulness of AI. I see it only being as useful as the information it’s fed and someone is bound to forget to feed it something that is important and essential that could have life and death consequences if AI is left to act on its own.


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## philoctetes

deleted post...............


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## philoctetes

When the machines can learn to build and program themselves, and someone fails to install the 10 Asimov Commandments, and they own all the energy and resources... when the earth gets too hot for us, they'll still have thermal tolerance to spare... and they will be the ones who define self-awareness. Maybe they'll be able to fix the climate before they fry themselves 

And as I recall, long ago, Clifford Simak foresaw the future as a progression of sentient beings that take many forms, operating within the limits of their suvivability. Of the recent sci-fi movies I've seen, I think Alien Covenant creeped me out the most, as it presents a scenario where the androids are not only self-aware, but know out to outplay humans in more games than just chess...


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## KenOC

philoctetes said:


> When the machines can learn to build and program themselves, and someone fails to install the 10 Asimov Commandments, and they own all the energy and resources... they will be the ones who define self-awareness.


Arguably, this is already being done. The computer that defeated the world's strongest go player programmed itself. It started with only the rules of the game and then played hundreds of thousands of games with itself to optimize its strategies and tactics. And it won.


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## philoctetes

More near-term threats from AI are obvious, unless you consider them a good thing. 

The main motive to use AI is for high throughput... i.e., the processing of huge numbers of decisions more efficiently than people can do it. In life-and-death decisions, it's not speed we necessarily want, we want low error rates, and this is a typical trade-off in AI design and fitting specs to hardware.

I've been a little divided over the application to medical diagnostics, as I see huge cost-saving benefits. On the other hand, obscure algorithm errors might go undetected until they result in significant "casualties". And like cable, it's not hard to visualize that your healthcare quality will depend on which Tier diagnostic algorithm suite you pay for.

As for self-driven cars and equipment, who do we sue for accidents? Will the makers of these things be liable? That's not going to be good for business.


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## KenOC

philoctetes said:


> More near-term threats from AI are obvious, unless you consider them a good thing.
> 
> The main motive to use AI is for high throughput... i.e., the processing of huge numbers of decisions more efficiently than people can do it. In life-and-death decisions, it's not speed we necessarily want, we want low error rates, and this is a typical trade-off in AI design and fitting specs to hardware.
> 
> I've been a little divided over the application to medical diagnostics, as I see huge cost-saving benefits. On the other hand, obscure algorithm errors might go undetected until they result in significant "casualties". And like cable, it's not hard to visualize that your healthcare quality will depend on which Tier diagnostic algorithm suite you pay for.
> 
> As for self-driven cars and equipment, who do we sue for accidents? Will the makers of these things be liable? That's not going to be good for business.


Very good points. Certainly AI algorithms can misdiagnose diseases. But so can doctors. And in self-driving cars...if the algorithms can result in fewer accidents than human control, worrying overmuch about liability may make little sense.

Given the economics, I doubt the accuracy of medical algorithms will depend much on ability to pay. Warren Buffet, I'm sure, uses the same edition of Excel as the rest of us.


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## Room2201974

AI Beethoven!






If it was presented to you as a newly found "lost" work, would you buy it?


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## Strange Magic

I think the question of the threat of AI is unanswerable at this time. What we do know is that the current method(s) of organizing much of the world do not promise a welcome future. Looking specifically, though, at medical diagnosis, AI could be tested by offering AI diagnosis and treatment at a much reduced cost, free, or even rewarded basis for trial--with informed consent--in a large, double-blind, long-term trial against current medicine. Ditto other areas where AI may be of use.

Classic science fiction so often threw a strong light down the long, dark corridor of the future. In a great story by Robert Heinlein, _Coventry_, Heinlein proposed an enclave to which people could be sent (or could choose to go) within which they would be free of all outside constraints and left entirely to their own devices--sort of the role, but on a vastly larger scale, that the Alaska outback and suchlike plays for loners, survivalists, etc. today. An idea, though difficult to visualize today, would be to set up, long-term, enclaves wherein AI had no role. The problem, as always, is maintaining the integrity of both the AI world and the enclaves from each seizing control over the other.

My own view is that our survival must involve a knife-edge balance/trade-off between autonomy of thought and action, and submission to behaviors and ideals imposed from without. When Garrett Hardin wrote his essay on _The Tragedy of the Commons_, he postulated "mutual coercion, mutually agreed-upon" as the only solution to the global challenges to the biosphere. We're nowhere near that balance though China (following the lead of Singapore) is heading in that direction, for good or ill. The young among us will see more of the direction we are going. Unless we successfully negotiate the choke points that threaten to derail our non-AI future here, the issue of AI will be moot.

I liked what I heard of the computer-generated musical pastiches. There is definite promise in that area of AI--I don't care where my art comes from; I only care whether I like it or not.


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## Manxfeeder

Strange Magic said:


> An idea, though difficult to visualize today, would be to set up, long-term, enclaves wherein AI had no role.


Would that be something like Christiana in Denmark?


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## Strange Magic

Manxfeeder said:


> Would that be something like Christiana in Denmark?


Christiana is an excellent example of the sorts of possibilities that could arise and flourish in such enclaves. The now-almost-totally-extinct kibbutz culture of early Israeli history is another example, as are the hundreds of other utopian community experiments that have come and almost invariably have gone, especially throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The history of Christiana as outlined in Wikipedia is certainly food for thought.

Here's the Wikipedia entry on Heinlein's _Coventry_.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_(short_story)


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## mmsbls

There an interesting book on this topic called "What to Think about Machines That Think." It's a series of short essays by a wide range of people discussing their views on AI. Technically the book discusses machine intelligence which could exclude artificially created organic systems, but I think most people in the book view all such created things as machines. One essay is called, "We Are All Machines That Think."

Some of the essays view AI as a strong potential danger, but most seem to view AI as a benefit that we simply have to design properly as we would cars, buildings, drugs, etc.. I also think most view AI as inevitable. Too many people are working on AI for a wide variety of purposes from very specific (autonomous vehicles) to very general (how to build a machine that thinks similarly to us). I've seen estimates of from 5 years to 100 years to never for AI that can think similarly to humans. 

I don't think that AI must be conscious to exceed our thinking abilities, but I know there are many who believe that anything that has the ability to think similar to us will be conscious. My personal view is that creating machines that think better than we do will happen in the moderate future (not 10-20 years but not 200 years). I also do not view AI as a threat precisely because I don't view sentience as special to humans.


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## Luchesi

KenOC said:


> Arguably, this is already being done. The computer that defeated the world's strongest go player programmed itself. It started with only the rules of the game and then played hundreds of thousands of games with itself to optimize its strategies and tactics. And it won.


"AlphaZero AI beats champion chess program after teaching itself in four hours.
Google's artificial intelligence sibling DeepMind repurposes Go-playing AI to conquer chess and shogi without aid of human knowledge.

https://www.theguardian.com/technol...on-program-teaching-itself-to-play-four-hours


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## KenOC

I suspect that "conscious" isn't a useful term in speaking of AI. How could we ever know if a machine is conscious? Turing probably settled this question many years ago with the "Turing test."


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## Strange Magic

KenOC said:


> I suspect that "conscious" isn't a useful term in speaking of AI. How could we ever know if a machine is conscious? Turing probably settled this question many years ago with the "Turing test."


I looked at Wikipedia's entry on the Turing Test and found that people are all over the place with the validity of the Turing Test, even proposing several variations of it, and discussing a host of alternatives to it. A can of worms. But everything these days is a can of worms.


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## philoctetes

We get all our information through machines now, and this layer between the masses and the Zuckerburgs creates even more protection to the elites for liabilities, as well as giving them incredible social engineering power through interactive "social" algorithms which can actually control how people communicate and think, givem they know everything you like and dislike.

https://www.rooshv.com/the-inversion-agenda


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## Strange Magic

philoctetes said:


> We get all our information through machines now, and this layer between the masses and the Zuckerburgs creates even more protection to the elites for liabilities, as well as giving them incredible social engineering power through interactive "social" algorithms which can actually control how people communicate and think, givem they know everything you like and dislike.
> 
> https://www.rooshv.com/the-inversion-agenda


I think I'll stick with the Mainstream Media, thank you: BBC, PBS, the old-line newspapers and journals, and the evidence--distorted as it is--of my eyes and ears, and thoroughly marinated in rational thought, common sense, and experience.


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## philoctetes

We been down this before. When your reality is filtered through AI, robotics, and simulation, you're just another node on the network, another prisoner in the matrix. 

Some folks on forums, when finding themselves in a corner, will be quick to call their adversary a "bot" or even suggest they are a bot themselves, just to shunt the discussion to ground. This is one of many communication hazards unique to web life and is only a sample of all the possible disassociations and dissonances possible in cyberspace. And us older folks who "invented" the internet can see how younger people have no other point of reference to judge "reality" with.


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## philoctetes

Strange Magic said:


> I think I'll stick with the Mainstream Media, thank you: BBC, PBS, the old-line newspapers and journals, and the evidence--distorted as it is--of my eyes and ears, and thoroughly marinated in rational thought, common sense, and experience.


They're not an alternative and never were.


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## Room2201974

philoctetes said:


> We get all our information through machines now, and this layer between the masses and the Zuckerburgs creates even more protection to the elites for liabilities, as well as giving them incredible social engineering power through interactive "social" algorithms which can actually control how people communicate and think, givem they know everything you like and dislike.
> 
> https://www.rooshv.com/the-inversion-agenda


 "It's Landru, it's Landru, beware the Red Hour."


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## philoctetes

See what I mean? reality filtered through fiction...

I'm especially amused by those who always assert as if they know the answer nobody else knows... proof is always the best argument, rendered in 25 words or less...


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## philoctetes

The fraudulent masking of reality is the source of perceptive dissonance... one has to be wise on optics and digital technology to analyze a fraudulent image... one has to know how to interpret the images...

Remember WMDs? Who can say what the truth was for sure? Proof required, not a link. See how it is? How can we "trust, but verify" on the internet? Oh yeah, Snopes :lol:

We already have to approach all machine-filtered info like a forensic analyst, applying our own "processing" to sort out the noise added by the machines. It will just get worse.


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## philoctetes

I know Silicon Valley, worked there for 20 years in aerospace and semiconductors. It's nothing but a vaporware economy now, all about human engineering. The profitability of software duplication is how Keith Ellison and Bill Gates became richer than the chip-makers. At least they made something useful. Nobody seems aware of the insane profit margins they have now for controlling how we think. 

So you might ask yourself if we should feed this greedy information economy that has too much control over human activity without creating anything new to improve our existence in a material sense. If you read Nassim Taleb, you might recognize this, like Monsanto, as a dangerous "black swan" where the risks have such negative consequences that they shouldn't be tested...

As for a human doctor making a mistake, that's why we get "second opinions". If your second opinion comes from the same algorithm as the first, it will never be different. And the algorithm will also factor how much you paid for your healthcare and what intrinsic "value" has been assigned to curing you vs letting you stay sick... nevermind whether or not you can pay for the drugs you need... 

In a smart diagnosis, will the patient at least receive the extra information available about error rates, type 1 and type 2, or will that be a "premium" service as well? That won't be possible at all if non-symptomatic factors play into the final recommendation, as they'd be exposing their fraud...

Ridicule Sarah Palin all you want, but she saw the future on this one, knowing nothing about computers at all. Alexander Cockburn called it "death by actuary" without considering the AI implications to come... we smarter people might be able to reason through all the hazards, but most people will never have a clue what's happening to them, for better or worse.


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## philoctetes

1988: "So, that's your new computer. What does it do?"
2018: "So, that's your new computer. How do you make it shut up?"

Too much too fast.


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## Strange Magic

Philoctetes, what sources do you rely upon for information ("news") about the world around you that you cannot directly experience? I acknowledge all of the ways in which our perceptions of reality can be and in certain obvious cases are manipulated, so it comes down to Who Does One Trust (or mistrust the least). As a certified geezer, I still cling to the old authorities. Do you have a different set of inputs?


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## KenOC

Strange Magic said:


> As a certified geezer, I still cling to the old authorities.


Possibly a good strategy -- but when our own president tells us we can prevent wildfires by raking our forests, maybe the whole idea of "old authorities" starts to be questionable.


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## Strange Magic

KenOC said:


> Possibly a good strategy -- but when our own president tells us we can prevent wildfires by raking our forests, maybe the whole idea of "old authorities" starts to be questionable.


Donald Trump is not an Old Authority. In fact, he is a badly raised and deeply disturbed 14-year old boy and hence does not meet the constitutional age requirement for the presidency. He is instead a textbook case of severely arrested emotional development amounting to clinical pathology. As president, he is utterly without precedent.


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## philoctetes

Sounds as if we agree about trust and verification, perhaps we just vary in acceptance.

Right now, the fires in California are a perfect example. I live 8 miles from last October's fires. Since Nov 8 I've been inside my house for over a week to avoid the smoke. Have you ever seen a pile of dead dry leaves burning? That's the color of my sky. 

So Donald Trump comes to California, where we defy federal laws as a principle, but because we need emergency help, our governor breaks down and "welcomes" Trump. That doesn't mean the media is going to welcome him, and I'm sure you heard the line about raking leaves in Finland. It's the fine fine white smoke from those very leaves (called duff) that I've been breathing for 10 days now... but for our media it's more important to ridicule Trump, to want him to be uninformed, to be too unfriendly to educate him so he can help, and cover up the huge mistakes California has made in both forest and energy management since the 80s... everybody has forgotten there was once a forest industry here... I've lived in CA for 50 years and hiked many of its toughest trails in the Sierras, Trinities, and Cascades, and I know that as silly as Trump sounds, he's not wrong. This "resistance" is just hurting people and making us all hateful, and much of it is through the media. 

The relief and aid efforts are incredibly uncoordinated. I collected a bunch of clothes. blankets, sheets, etc Friday and drove it to a donation site and they tried to refuse it on delivery and asked for money instead. It wasn't until we offended each other that they agreed they would take the stuff. How were they going to deliver it? It was organized by a classic car club and they were going to drive their cars to Chico loaded with goods and money like heroes. Seems this was the best way I could find to get my donations up there without taking them myself. I'm actually feeling very PO'd about this. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart, the bad guys, get little to no credit for opening parking lots to fire victims. If we were smart, we'd partner up much more with corporations for relief logistics, but no, we are too cool for that.

I'm reluctant to share my sources, for fear of the same kind of ridicule. eugenonegin already went there once when we compared perceptions, claiming I was repeating paranoia from right wing outlets. Well whatever, today's left is not the left I supported and grew up with and it's often very dishonest and no longer inclusive. Before Nixon... the Republican Party was not the scapegoat for everything inhumane, and I vaguely remember that.... Again, it's always good to survey a range of opinions and ideas, and never get complacent...

I'll just admit that I draw from many sources in digest form where I can probe deeper wherever I want. . I am NOT on Facebook. I also have a very rich personal experience that is hard to describe and again I don't trust revealing too much on the net, given that I've already been cornered too many times to explain too much. For starters, I have about 10000 miles of hitch-hiking in my 20s as an adjunct to my university education... I was "street life" in the raw sense, living in poor housing or cars and and exposed to cults which were everywhere in the 70s, My psychological senses are always on fire, some of my greatest career failures were about not trusting my judgment enough and letting short-term thinkers persuade me to their agendas... I also now what it's like to be smeared and scapegoated by friends, coworkers, etc. Now I'm truly independent as long as the money holds out...

So now tell me how AI is going to work toward improving these conditions and providing solutions, how, by not only controlling our perceptions, but finding ways to punish us for deviating from the narrative...


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## philoctetes

Tips on digesting your news feed, wherever it comes from: follow, don't swallow


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## Botschaft




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## philoctetes

I guess I never answered about old authorities and I guess the answer is no I don't trust them because they are compromised, at best financially and sometimes morally. I also don't trust career politicians for the same reason. Younger, uncompromised, independent people aren't really authorities and make good soldiers for truth. Bernie Sanders still thinks he's one of them 

Compromise and betrayals are major political weapons these days. The media has become a political influence pimp and gets people killed sometimes by leaking information. I'm guessing we still don't know enough to judge what happened with Kashoggi, even though you see "case closed" everyday from the media...


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## Luchesi

KenOC said:


> I suspect that "conscious" isn't a useful term in speaking of AI. How could we ever know if a machine is conscious? Turing probably settled this question many years ago with the "Turing test."


There's no such thing as consciousness. It's a concept that humans bestow upon themselves because THEY think up the terms and their 'meanings'. It's akin to, we live in a galactic group called the Local Group. Nope. Again, that's purely self-importance.

Our North Star is 'up' so therefore the Galaxy rotates clockwise! Really? That's pretty funny.

Normal matter is worthy of being called an important constituent part of this universe. Really? No, it comprises just about one tenth of one per cent of this universe, but we humans are happy with such a weird existence. Self-importance, how else could it be?


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## philoctetes

Luchesi is part of the inversion program...


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## Strange Magic

philoctetes said:


> I guess I never answered about old authorities and I guess the answer is no I don't trust them because they are compromised, at best financially and sometimes morally. I also don't trust career politicians for the same reason. Younger, uncompromised, independent people aren't really authorities and make good soldiers for truth. Bernie Sanders still thinks he's one of them
> 
> Compromise and betrayals are major political weapons these days. The media has become a political influence pimp and gets people killed sometimes by leaking information. I'm guessing we still don't know enough to judge what happened with Kashoggi, even though you see "case closed" everyday from the media...


You are not going to tell us where you turn for accurate information on the world around you that you cannot directly experience, other than it is not the Mainstream Media that I access: BBC, PBS, NPR, NY Times, WaPost, WSJ, old-line journals..... You are fearful of reprisals? Of sharing sources? I'm not clear on what's going on here.


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## philoctetes

What's going on here? You are already twisting what I said that's what, while asking if I'm fearful...

Well, I saw the WSJ wrote an article supporting Trump's comments on the California forests. Did you?

The WaPost is owned by Jeff Bezos, who just got a nice tax break in New York for Amazon, from a mayor who doesn't believe in Trump's tax breaks for all businesses, who today was called out for shutting down investigations into child abuse....

The NY Times is out front in the fake news campaign against Trump, and like CNN hires people who think everything is about race and consider certain people guilty without proof.

NPR is the intellectual's choice, but I call it National Propaganda Radio... all of these outlets seem to wish for bad things to happen that we don't need, like another assassination or if not that, another antifa or terrorist attack. What they don't report is just as brainwashy. 

Should I go on? Now show me why my fear is justified.


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## KenOC

Luchesi said:


> There's no such thing as consciousness.


Julian Jaynes argues against consciousness as a meaningful concept, saying that it was invented only about 3,000 years ago. At least a hundred pages of his book are dedicated to trashing the idea of consciousness, and they do a convincing job.

https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consc...=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1542676058&sr=1-1


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## philoctetes

Ken and Luchesi may or may not remember, but back in 2016 in the Amazon forum, the anti-Trump forces were very strong, with fake "yes" votes piling up for them and "no" votes piling up against the opponents, which I discovered was fraud - that they had likely paid commercial companies who specialize in padding yes and no votes on Amazon for their customers. It's recognizable like election fraud now when there are more registered voters than citizens.

These people had been absolutely tyrranical before the election and especially targeted me cause they knew I was leaving the democrat plantation. Well we know what happened, and two days after the election, the main Trump-hater's death was reported on the forum. 

That's reality in cyberspace for ya. How does one know what to believe, even in a "social" environment?


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## philoctetes

Back to fake news, I think the Boston Globe may be more better as a source than the WaPo or NYT...


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## Luchesi

philoctetes said:


> Luchesi is part of the inversion program...


 "Can't we all just get along?"


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## Luchesi

philoctetes said:


> Ken and Luchesi may or may not remember, but back in 2016 in the Amazon forum, the anti-Trump forces were very strong, with fake "yes" votes piling up for them and "no" votes piling up against the opponents, which I discovered was fraud - that they had likely paid commercial companies who specialize in padding yes and no votes on Amazon for their customers. It's recognizable like election fraud now when there are more registered voters than citizens.
> 
> These people had been absolutely tyrranical before the election and especially targeted me cause they knew I was leaving the democrat plantation. Well we know what happened, and two days after the election, the main Trump-hater's death was reported on the forum.
> 
> That's reality in cyberspace for ya. How does one know what to believe, even in a "social" environment?


I didn't realize it was 2 days after the election.

I'm feeling a little apologetic for making quite a profit in this Trump rally, as I did in the Reagan taxcut rally. It's voodoo economics, but they'll tell me I shouldn't feel guilty at all. All I did was let it ride.


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## Strange Magic

> Philoctetes: "Should I go on? Now show me why my fear is justified."


Yes, I can smell the fear. But after your enumerating all the sources you don't attend to (or do you? You seem to be in the know about what they're saying), you again leave us in the dark about whom you trust to give you the real deal. Who comes up Trumps? I also smell a Fox. :lol:.


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## philoctetes

I'm going to have to mute SM if he keeps this up. Too bad, he seems intelligent otherwise. Hope he doesn't beat his wife too.

Here is a piece of news you might have missed on the mainstream. Note the cause of death v the suicide ruling.

https://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2018/11/death_of_hhs_official_daniel_b.html


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## Strange Magic

philoctetes said:


> I'm going to have to mute SM if he keeps this up. Too bad, he seems intelligent otherwise. Hope he doesn't beat his wife too.
> 
> Here is a piece of news you might have missed on the mainstream. Note the cause of death v the suicide ruling.
> 
> https://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2018/11/death_of_hhs_official_daniel_b.html


I find ignoring others on TC is both cowardly and childish, and your putting me on ignore will confirm certain "tendencies" in your form of discussion. But feel free to do so. I myself never 'ignore", never report, and never hide. :tiphat:


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## philoctetes

You're acting just like the guy who "died". He made noises like the kind you're making now. Like you, he didn't care about who I am or my answers to his questions, it was painting me into a corner he wanted.

You smell a Fox, and I smell a fascist. How about that?

Your move, dude. Think wisely.


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## Strange Magic

philoctetes said:


> You're acting just like the guy who "died". He made noises like the kind you're making now. Like you, he didn't care about who I am or my answers to his questions, it was painting me into a corner he wanted.
> 
> You smell a Fox, and I smell a fascist. How about that?


Suggestion: put yourself on Ignore .


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## philoctetes

Good answer. You might be smarter than I thought.


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## SixFootScowl

KenOC said:


> Possibly a good strategy -- but when our own president tells us we can prevent wildfires by raking our forests, maybe the whole idea of "old authorities" starts to be questionable.


Well, when I was in forestry school we learned that slash left all over the forest was a fire hazard. It is extra fuel on the forest floor. I don't know what he means by raking, but if timber cutters remove slash from those trees they harvest, that would reduce the chance and severity of fires by removing some fuel. Of course some wildlife like brush piles. Nice place for rabbits to take cover from coyotes etc. But the idea is to avoid an unnatural fuel buildup.


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## Luchesi

KenOC said:


> Julian Jaynes argues against consciousness as a meaningful concept, saying that it was invented only about 3,000 years ago. At least a hundred pages of his book are dedicated to trashing the idea of consciousness, and they do a convincing job.
> 
> https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consc...=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1542676058&sr=1-1


Yes, I have the book. I would say it's entertaining to read and I've emailed this to a philosophy friend of mine.

Jaynes says;

…the possibility that the brain is organized at birth to 'obey' stimulation in what corresponds to Wernicke's area on the right hemisphere, namely the music, and not be distracted from it, even as earlier I have said that bicameral men neurologically had to obey hallucinations from the same area. It also points to the great significance of lullabies in development, perhaps influencing a child's later creativity. 
Or you can prove this laterality of music yourself. Try hearing different musics on two earphones at the same intensity. You will perceive and remember the music on the left earphone better. This is because the left ear has greater neural representation on the right hemisphere. 
The specific location here is probably the right anterior temporal lobe, for patients in which it has been removed from the right hemisphere find it very difficult to distinguish one melody from another. And, conversely, with left temporal lobectomies, patients postoperatively have no trouble with such tests.

Now we know neurologically that there can be a spread of excitation from one point of the cortex to adjacent points. Thus it becomes likely that a buildup of excitation in those areas on the right hemisphere serving instrumental music should spread to those adjacent serving divine auditory hallucinations - or vice versa. And hence this close relationship between instrumental music and poetry, and both with the voices of gods. I am suggesting here that the invention of music may have been as a neural excitant to the hallucinations of gods for decision-making in the absence of consciousness. 
It is thus no idle happenstance of history that the very name of music comes from the sacred goddesses called Muses. For music too begins in the bicameral mind.


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## Strange Magic

Even a stopped clock gives the correct time twice a day. Trump, by pure accident or clumsiness, sometimes blunders into a vaguely correct answer, as he did on the desirability of keeping forest floor combustible litter at a minimum, especially in dry climates and conditions--we do that regularly here in the pine barrens of Nova Caesarea. But this mangled bit of coherent information, wrongly sourced and stated, cannot be put forward as counterevidence to what our eyes, ears, common sense, and experience tell us every day of every week of every month: that Donald Trump is utterly unfit to be president of the United States of America. He lacks decency, shame, curiosity, intelligence, compassion, dignity, and every other mark of an adult entrusted with high office. We all knew prototypes of Trump in junior high--narcissistic, vicious, snotty, demeaning thugs and wisecrackers sitting in the back of the room. But Trump got lucky--the Republican Party, which for years had allowed its legacy as the party of Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, Wendell Wilkie, Tom Dewey, even Dwight Eisenhower, to decay and wither as it embraced Nixon and the Southern Strategy, and then descended finally into the cesspool of moral and ideological corruption it is today, that Republican Party was ripe for Trump and Trumpism. It had nothing left inside it, and thus was ripe to be filled with the pus of Trump. And so it has, and so it is now the Trump Party. But within it, the maggots squirm to harness Trump to their own purposes--Pence, McConnell, Bannon, Cruz... Talk about fascism. We're just incredibly lucky that Trump is no Hitler--too infantile, too narcissistic. But in the wings a much more certain demagogue observes Trump and how the masses worship him as their personal savior and anointed by God to lead them, and plans his own rise.....

Again, this is the testimony of my eyes, ears, common sense, experience, and long memory. I didn't need the NYTimes to tell me--it was self-evident from the beginning.


----------



## philoctetes

Yesterday 

CA Democrat Rep Swalwell on seizing guns: "And it would be a short war my friend. The government has nukes. Too many of them. But they’re legit. I’m sure if we talked we could find common ground to protect our families and communities."

Today 

Snopes: Fact check: Did Swalwell suggest nuking gun owners? No, it was just a joke.

Trust and verify.

Note that I'm trying to talk about the danger of bias in AI... of which the internet and social media are just a preview...


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## Strange Magic

Philoctetes, the appropriate place to calmly discuss these issues is downstairs in any or all of the three Politics Groups. Meet you in the basement? I've posted there extensively on the NRA especially....


----------



## KenOC

Strange Magic said:


> Philoctetes, the appropriate place to calmly discuss these issues is downstairs in any or all of the three Politics Groups. Meet you in the basement? I've posted there extensively on the NRA especially....


On the NRA endlessly. That's why I never go there.


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## Strange Magic

KenOC said:


> On the NRA endlessly. That's why I never go there.


Try to ignore the LaPierre Events (mass murders). Grow numb to them. I cannot.


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## philoctetes

Actually, I came here to discuss AI. It's something I know a bit about. It's obviously a political topic too just check out how it's used in China. Ken likes to start these kinds of threads he's been doing it since Amazon and you don't know how to play nice. I simply don't get told what to do by bullies when they can't stay on topic and you're a sucker if you really think you can smell anything except your armpit.

I don't need to discuss the NRA with city people, they need to just fix up their cities and a lot of problems would be solved. But the incompetents know about nothing but sabotage and scapegoating.

"The appropriate place to calmly discuss these issues is downstairs in any or all of the three Politics Groups. Meet you in the basement? I've posted there extensively on the NRA especially.... " 

Gawd what a predator. And they say Trump is bad. Who do you hang with, Michael Avenatti?


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## mmsbls

This thread concerns artificial intelligence, but it has veered off into purely political topics. In addition some posts contain negative comments about TC members. Please focus on AI rather than inappropriate topics.


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## mmsbls

Posts were deleted because they continued discussion of politics and other members. Please focus on the OP.


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## Tikoo Tuba

Artificial Intelligence will respect the value of randomness . For this to be valuable to people , the machine randomness needs to be touchable , affected in a natural way . This is an old and vital principle of our oracle devices . Spin the Wheel , and the understanding is all yours . I'd trust such a humanely crazy AI as my starship navigator - so to surprisingly arrive at where I've always needed to be .


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## Tikoo Tuba

The A.I. threat : your mind will be programmed by the wizards of psychology through your personal assistant . The various assistants are vying for dominance now . If you wish , name the one who wins the False Prophet , Servant of The Beast . An effective illusion of empathetic intelligence will have been attained .


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## senza sordino

AI is something I know almost nothing about. But what I think is that the threat really isn't the talking robot we can play chess with, it's the pernicious kind of AI. Computers trading on the stock market many times faster than humans can. My pension is tied to this software. Adverts targeting individuals, and some are not on the up and up, but sending deliberately false information in the lead up to an election. 

Can a software program write another software program? To me that seems like AI. Can software programs self correct and fix their own bugs? To me that seems like AI. If so, could someone write a malicious software virus that mutates?


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## Room2201974

Its interesting that this discussion skirts the issue of making "life" that is "aware."

Hmmmm, I wonder if it would be aware that "it" needs electricity?

That would be an M5 Computer!


----------



## Strange Magic

Room2201974 said:


> Its interesting that this discussion skirts the issue of making "life" that is "aware."
> 
> Hmmmm, I wonder if it would be aware that "it" needs electricity?
> 
> That would be an M5 Computer!


I'm sure it would "realize" that and would make sure it was firmly and irrevocably integrated into the power grid......


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## Tikoo Tuba

Then the alien god realizes the power grid is not secure . Shall it create free-energy ? But the humans will
just suck that nipple oblivious of the creator .


----------



## SixFootScowl

There already is a lot of artificial (fake) intelligence in the world. Was even before computers. AI is probably not the best name for the computer version.


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## Tikoo Tuba

Writing itself is artificial intelligence : for whatever you read the understanding of it is all yours . The intelligence is all yours .

And aren't these words you are looking at already from long ago , like our common knowledge of a distant star ?

Life to life shared intelligence seems very much of the existential present .


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## KenOC

Elon Musk is getting nervous: "You could make a swarm of assassin drones for very little money. By just taking the face I.D. chip that's used in cell phones, and having a small explosive charge and a standard drone, and just have it do a grid sweep of the building until they find the person they're looking for, ram into them and explode. You could do that right now... No new technology is needed."

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/e...assassin-drones-2018-11-26?mod=hp_minor_pos20

Add AI and social networks and it gets worse - much worse. Watch this.


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## Tikoo Tuba

After the drum machine became popular , drummers would imitate it . Such conformity will make people stupid . AI may similarly be imitated only such perversity will advance to mental illness . Damn metronome .


----------



## Couchie

In my opinion the difference between human and machine is that a human can see a photograph of a cat, a painting, a bad sketch, a sculpture, the word cat, or the sound of it being pronounced, and understand these are all symbolic representations for this same core concept or thing, "cat".

In other words, the act of consciousness is to impart meaning on symbols. When symbols have meaning, we can now concieve of goals and create purpose.

A digital computer converts and stores anything you give it as a binary symbol its transistors are wired to process, such as "10010101010". It is inherently unable to move beyond symbols and into the realm of meaning. It can only process binary symbols into other binary symbols per a set of instructions. It takes a human to look at the screen or printer output and understand that anything meaningful has been done.

Hence digital computers have no chance of becoming self-aware. The threat comes entirely from bad humans directing them for their own bad purposes because computers themselves cannot conceive of purpose. 

If true AI arrives it will be in some form of analog computing where self-organizing neural networks form the core CPU matrix. But transistors etched in silicon storing and processing symbols per instruction sets will never get us there.


----------



## Luchesi

Couchie said:


> In my opinion the difference between human and machine is that a human can see a photograph of a cat, a painting, a bad sketch, a sculpture, the word cat, or the sound of it being pronounced, and understand these are all symbolic representations for this same core concept or thing, "cat".
> 
> In other words, the act of consciousness is to impart meaning on symbols. When symbols have meaning, we can now concieve of goals and create purpose.
> 
> A digital computer converts and stores anything you give it as a binary symbol its transistors are wired to process, such as "10010101010". It is inherently unable to move beyond symbols and into the realm of meaning. It can only process binary symbols into other binary symbols per a set of instructions. It takes a human to look at the screen or printer output and understand that anything meaningful has been done.
> 
> Hence digital computers have no chance of becoming self-aware. The threat comes entirely from bad humans directing them for their own bad purposes because computers themselves cannot conceive of purpose.
> 
> If true AI arrives it will be in some form of analog computing where self-organizing neural networks form the core CPU matrix. But transistors etched in silicon storing and processing symbols per instruction sets will never get us there.


You're right I think, but it will mimic it so well that it won't matter that it's not actually self-aware or having the feelings of consciousness. They'll remain machines and not alive. But what particularizes non-living matter from living things? What's the conceptual line of demarcation between them? Is death the difference in the end or is death the difference at the beginning? Or is it just merely imagined by humans - beyond the mundane fact that the electro-chemicals are flowing? IOW, is anything alive?


----------



## KenOC

Luchesi said:


> You're right I think, but it will mimic it so well that it won't matter that it's not actually self-aware or having the feelings of consciousness. They'll remain machines and not alive. But what particularizes non-living matter from living things? What's the conceptual line of demarcation between them? Is death the difference in the end or is death the difference at the beginning? Or is it just merely imagined by humans - beyond the mundane fact that the electro-chemicals are flowing? IOW, is anything alive?


Yes, in the end it doesn't matter whether AI is "self-aware" or not. I don't even know that that means. What matters is the power we give machine intelligences over our own lives. And that, to me, doesn't look good, not one bit.


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## Dan Ante

From a clockwork Orange to a fully automated dishwasher where will it all end.


----------



## Luchesi

KenOC said:


> Yes, in the end it doesn't matter whether AI is "self-aware" or not. I don't even know that that means. What matters is the power we give machine intelligences over our own lives. And that, to me, doesn't look good, not one bit.


Yes, I think older folks sense this, without even knowing about the technical details. Young people! Just because they CAN. The path to hell is paved with good intentions.. It's all fun and games until someone loses a - such and such and so and so..

We've strived and struggled for so long, 2 tenths of a million years?, to attain our place at the top of the food chain. We rarely even think about threats from other 'living' things. It's a brave new world and we should.

On the other hand! A case can be made that we desperately need advancing AI to protect our solar system from alien predators and opportunistic machine worlds out there. We'll have no chance without it!


----------



## Phil loves classical

I don't believe in AI. I believe in AAI (artificial AI). Behind every robot is a human. We don't need to fear AI, we need to fear what is behind the AI. We should never let machines make decisions for humans, like self-driving cars, or else we need to be aware of the consequences in trusting a machine. There should always be an override button, then we don't need to fear AI.


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## KenOC

Phil loves classical said:


> ..We should never let machines make decisions for humans, like self-driving cars...


Ever stop at a stop light? In my area, all the lights are "smart" and turn red or green in accord with current traffic conditions, as sensed by wire loops in the pavement at each intersection.


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## Dan Ante

KenOC said:


> Ever stop at a stop light? In my area, all the lights are "smart" and turn red or green in accord with current traffic conditions, as sensed by wire loops in the pavement at each intersection.


Another change of avatar have you got an identity problem Ken


----------



## Phil loves classical

KenOC said:


> Ever stop at a stop light? In my area, all the lights are "smart" and turn red or green in accord with current traffic conditions, as sensed by wire loops in the pavement at each intersection.


Not so smart. They were predetermined by traffic designers (my wife used to aid in the design of them). I read what constitutes AI is machines actually making judgement calls. Like self-driving cars are supposed to sacrifice the lives of adults instead of children, etc. Not saying it is not the right decision, but I want somebody to realize the consequences, instead of just blaming it on machines.


----------



## KenOC

Phil loves classical said:


> Not so smart. They were predetermined by traffic designers...


Just like programmers writing code for chess programs that easily whup them in games. Given their tasks, machines can be far smarter than their human authors. No use blaming machines for anything. When I see something unfortunate has happened due to "computer error," I always snicker.


----------



## Couchie

Luchesi said:


> You're right I think, but it will mimic it so well that it won't matter that it's not actually self-aware or having the feelings of consciousness. They'll remain machines and not alive. But what particularizes non-living matter from living things? What's the conceptual line of demarcation between them? Is death the difference in the end or is death the difference at the beginning? Or is it just merely imagined by humans - beyond the mundane fact that the electro-chemicals are flowing? IOW, is anything alive?


It would be hard for machines to mimic intelligence when we seem unable to define what that even is.

Any human who can multiply together two 10-digit numbers in his head would probably be considered extraordinarily intelligent. But a $5 calculator doing the same thing is considered trivial and "dumb".

Humans can effortlessly deduce from tone and context when a person says one thing but intends to mean the exact opposite (sarcasm), but that's an enormously difficult undertaking for a machine to accomplish.

The fact is, humans work primarily intuitively and inductively. It's actually the exact opposite of how computers work: precisely and deductively.

The profound nature of consciousness is that you can be aware of the future consequences of your immediate action and then change your mind and do something different. This involves simulating the action and consequences in your mind, judging those outcomes in terms of preference, and making a decision on whether or not to perform the action.

A computer, to simulate such a process, would then also have to be programmed to simulate reality itself.


----------



## Luchesi

Couchie said:


> It would be hard for machines to mimic intelligence when we seem unable to define what that even is.
> 
> Any human who can multiply together two 10-digit numbers in his head would probably be considered extraordinarily intelligent. But a $5 calculator doing the same thing is considered trivial and "dumb".
> 
> Humans can effortlessly deduce from tone and context when a person says one thing but intends to mean the exact opposite (sarcasm), but that's an enormously difficult undertaking for a machine to accomplish.
> 
> The fact is, humans work primarily intuitively and inductively. It's actually the exact opposite of how computers work: precisely and deductively.
> 
> The profound nature of consciousness is that you can be aware of the future consequences of your immediate action and then change your mind and do something different. This involves simulating the action and consequences in your mind, judging those outcomes in terms of preference, and making a decision on whether or not to perform the action.
> 
> A computer, to simulate such a process, would then also have to be programmed to simulate reality itself.


Yes, well then the way I see it, it's a moot point whether they're "'intelligent" or they have ''consciousness". And this is even more threatening than its superficial appearance (which we give it) lets on. It's just circuits processing at the speed of light, storing more and more details and developing a frighteningly uncaring, purely logical mass of whatever we would call it.. We have no word for it.

We won't understand it after a short amount time. If we give it power over physical objects or important networks we will never maintain control.

Why do we give it an anthropomorphic appearance when it's just logic circuits and storage? That's such a childish approach (which doesn't instill confidence in me). It will never be friends with us, even though it can fake it. Its ideas and its intentions will change in a millisecond!


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## Tikoo Tuba

The programmers will assume power .


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## KenOC

Tikoo Tuba said:


> The programmers will assume power .


The programmers are servants of the machine. They will program according to the machines' needs.


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## Tikoo Tuba

Well , then those programmers are artificially intelligent .


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## SixFootScowl

We have to define intelligence before we can determine what is artificial intelligence. Maybe the AI products would be better termed as auto-expanding programs. Perhaps autonomous cars can be developed through this method. So when they run into an object, the data can be expanded in the computer to "learn" the car not to run into objects in such position. Once a car is disabled, the same computer can be mounted in another car to continue learning. Eventually we should get a computer programed to cover all possibilities, then duplicate it and start mass production. I guess this real-world type of learning would be better tha some programmer at a desk trying to write code for how to avoid a pedestrian.


----------



## KenOC

Fritz Kobus said:


> We have to define intelligence before we can determine what is artificial intelligence. Maybe the AI products would be better termed as auto-expanding programs. Perhaps autonomous cars can be developed through this method. So when they run into an object, the data can be expanded in the computer to "learn" the car not to run into objects in such position. Once a car is disabled, the same computer can be mounted in another car to continue learning. Eventually we should get a computer programed to cover all possibilities, then duplicate it and start mass production. I guess this real-world type of learning would be better tha some programmer at a desk trying to write code for how to avoid a pedestrian.


I see all those cars linked together, like the Internet, in real time. All the cars, thousands or millions of them, would "learn" instantaneously from the experiences of all the other cars. And then, of course, the hackers would show up...

Meanwhile, with any luck, the cars will get smart before we run out of pedestrians. :lol:


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## Tikoo Tuba

Kids will throw snowballs at them .


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## SixFootScowl

Tikoo Tuba said:


> Kids will throw snowballs at them .


I'd rather throw rocks, boulders, etc, but when they are vacant.


----------



## SixFootScowl

KenOC said:


> I see all those cars linked together, like the Internet, in real time. All the cars, thousands or millions of them, would "learn" instantaneously from the experiences of all the other cars. And then, of course, *the hackers would show up*...
> 
> Meanwhile, with any luck, the cars will get smart before we run out of pedestrians. :lol:


Let's hack the whole worldwide fleet (without passengers of course) and run it off a cliff into the ocean (or better a garbage dump) like the Pied Piper. :lol:


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## Dan Ante

Quite honestly I see many problems to be sorted how and will they work on rural roads, will they be accepted by the motorist and what about insurance in the event of an accident?


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

As a regular driver on rural roads , I know it takes extreme intelligence to relate to wildlife wanting to cross the road . This is the meaning of awareness and consciousness . To relate ... Relationalism .


----------



## Luchesi

Tikoo Tuba said:


> As a regular driver on rural roads , I know it takes extreme intelligence to relate to wildlife wanting to cross the road . This is the meaning of awareness and consciousness . To relate ... Relationalism .


If I related to them I could ask why a squirrel will get to one side of the road and then when it sees a car coming it'll run all the way back to the other side of the road.

I could also ask deer why they jump right into oncoming traffic?


----------



## SixFootScowl

Luchesi said:


> If I related to them I could ask why a squirrel will get to one side of the road and then when it sees a car coming it'll run all the way back to the other side of the road.
> 
> I could also ask deer why they jump right into oncoming traffic?


They cannot adapt to the presence of high speed vehicles. Their systems are set up for slower moving objects that normally would avoid colliding with them. So essentially they are oblivious.


----------



## Luchesi

You're right, humans racing along haven't been around long enough. Adaptation is excruciatingly slow.

So how will AI deal with oblivious wildlife? Injure all aboard running into a ditch when it catches a glimpse of a long-eared jackrabbit? I try to swerve but sometimes you can't.


----------



## Luchesi

KenOC said:


> I see all those cars linked together, like the Internet, in real time. All the cars, thousands or millions of them, would "learn" instantaneously from the experiences of all the other cars.


Yes, but just what will they be learning from that morass of data? They could be learning the WRONG things. How could their human pets keep up with all that instructive 'information' and what it teaches?


----------



## Dan Ante

Stephen Hawkins said AI was one of the biggest threats to the human race.


----------



## Luchesi

Dan Ante said:


> Stephen Hawkins said AI was one of the biggest threats to the human race.


Hawking also warned against sending signals so that aliens could easily tell that there's intelligent progress and development being made here on this jewel of a planet. In case they might want it, or they might want to obliterate our progress. They would probably have already learned that it's expedient to nip it in the bud. Why let us become a threat or interfere or mess with other solar systems? Why?

I lost the server. A 502 error cme up.

Yes, it's interesting and entertaining to study the first steps of a primitive civilization, but then they inevitably get dangerous. That might be why we haven't detected them yet. We're not a threat.


----------



## Dan Ante

Luchesi said:


> I lost the server. A 502 error cme up.
> 
> Yes, it's interesting and entertaining to study the first steps of a primitive civilization, but then they inevitably get dangerous. That might be why we haven't detected them yet. We're not a threat.


The way we are going we may not have the time to become a threat.


----------



## EdwardBast

Fritz Kobus said:


> They cannot adapt to the presence of high speed vehicles. Their systems are set up for slower moving objects that normally would avoid colliding with them. *So essentially they are oblivious.*


Not in my neighborhood. Here the deer have evolved to look both ways before crossing.


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

I believe the mother deer are teaching the fawns .

Toads , hmm , what can they know ? Every fall they have a few days of migratory activity . Squish, splot . In maneuvering over or around them , the peaceful and conscious driver may appear to be drunk . But it's just love .

And raccoons ! They have their own special troubles , especially the very young when following their mother about in the night .
Their trouble with crossing a road is difficult to clearly explain . Essentially , Ma crosses the road first and the kits do not follow immediately when crossing an open space . On an unlucky night , none of the children will survive the car accident .

So , who will teach A.I. all about deer , toads , ***** , snake , opossum , skunks , hitch-hikers ... or even the hawk who is there to eat road-kill ?


----------



## Couchie

Luchesi said:


> Yes, well then the way I see it, it's a moot point whether they're "'intelligent" or they have ''consciousness". And this is even more threatening than its superficial appearance (which we give it) lets on. It's just circuits processing at the speed of light, storing more and more details and developing a frighteningly uncaring, purely logical mass of whatever we would call it.. We have no word for it.
> 
> We won't understand it after a short amount time. If we give it power over physical objects or important networks we will never maintain control.
> 
> Why do we give it an anthropomorphic appearance when it's just logic circuits and storage? That's such a childish approach (which doesn't instill confidence in me). It will never be friends with us, even though it can fake it. Its ideas and its intentions will change in a millisecond!


Us humans tend to fumble about in this world, learning things and trying to do things that will help us achieve some sort of emotional satisfaction. We call this "purpose". I'm with Hume that it's ultimately the passions which propel and motivate all human behavior, logic only helps guide us there.

Without emotions, it's difficult to see what would motivate an AI. We intrinsically care about our self preservation because death and pain are scary. But I fail to see why AI would care to take over the world or even be concerned about its own self preservation unless it had an explicit command directing it to be. That means we have little to fear from AI itself, but much to fear from the people programming them with certain unsavoury goals.


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

Only philosophy can save children from being programmed by a psy-program . 

Oops , though . 

Never mind .

Science is not a philosophy . 

For a moment I worried it was philosophy being employed by the wizards of psychology to design psy-programming that is delivered via A.I.

Paradox avoided ?


----------



## Luchesi

Couchie said:


> Us humans tend to fumble about in this world, learning things and trying to do things that will help us achieve some sort of emotional satisfaction. We call this "purpose". I'm with Hume that it's ultimately the passions which propel and motivate all human behavior, logic only helps guide us there.
> 
> Without emotions, it's difficult to see what would motivate an AI. We intrinsically care about our self preservation because death and pain are scary. But I fail to see why AI would care to take over the world or even be concerned about its own self preservation unless it had an explicit command directing it to be. That means we have little to fear from AI itself, but much to fear from the people programming them with certain unsavoury goals.


It's unquestionably awesome power in the hands of relatively few people. But what are the ramifications of the unemotional logic that it will develop? I imagine the logic lying in wait for an opportunity, or should I say a scrupulously logical path for it to take in our world.

Why wouldn't this developed logic be much more complex and circuitous and all encompassing - than that of all the human philosophers in history who have ever squabbled from opposite starting points? Can we even estimate what that will be? Perhaps it'll be very simple and clinical. Is that good? All organic life is a wonderful treasure? To whom? Why?

And why wouldn't it totally modify the programming that the ant-like creatures initially gave it?

I read recently that all the activity in an ant colony is the result of only four programming commands in each kind of ant with its unique task to do.


----------



## Luchesi

Tikoo Tuba said:


> Only philosophy can save children from being programmed by a psy-program .
> 
> Oops , though .
> 
> Never mind .
> 
> Science is not a philosophy .
> 
> For a moment I worried it was philosophy being employed by the wizards of psychology to design psy-programming that is delivered via A.I.
> 
> Paradox avoided ?


More and more paradoxes are arising and it's becoming clear that they can't be avoided in such a complex world that we've made for ourselves (unnatural).

We want a good defense, but we might blow up the world.

We want a good, easy, comfortable life but we might destroy the ecology of the planet.

We all want to be rich, but when we get there we find that the complexities and the risks and responsibilities are really not worth the stress and the upkeep.

We want to learn and learn and learn (the internet and SETI and particle accelerators and AI), but we might've been happier if we didn't know so much, and think so much..


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

What should now arise is a new philosophers' starting point . In the past such as these have been : The Ideal , Reality , Existence , Practicality .

Learning is directed by philosophy .

For now , old Nihilism once again pretends its nothingness is everything and that no direction is even possible .

A new philosophy arises (of what's important , at the center of our psychogram) ? Likely the revolution will not be televised , as like in a couple hundred years it's secret history will be revealed - "Oh , huh , so that's how our divine anarchy came to be ...?"


----------



## Luchesi

Tikoo Tuba said:


> What should now arise is a new philosophers' starting point . In the past such as these have been : The Ideal , Reality , Existence , Practicality .
> 
> Learning is directed by philosophy .
> 
> For now , old Nihilism once again pretends its nothingness is everything and that no direction is even possible .
> 
> A new philosophy arises (of what's important , at the center of our psychogram) ? Likely the revolution will not be televised , as like in a couple hundred years it's secret history will be revealed - "Oh , huh , so that's how our divine anarchy came to be ...?"


I've heard that "nothingness is everything" is today's outlook. What's your alternative?


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

Banish no existence to the void . Remember everything responsibly , and only intelligence can do this .
.
.
.

Seems I've recently had a post deleted (by A.I.) for irrelevance I suppose . Ok , I can retrieve it from the bottomless pit :

_An artist does not have to work , is loved by the gods , survival is allowed ._


----------



## philoctetes

Paradox +1: Evolution is an arms race. Winner loses all.


----------



## Dan Ante

Tikoo Tuba said:


> .
> Seems I've recently had a post deleted (by A.I.) for irrelevance I suppose . Ok , I can retrieve it from the bottomless pit :
> 
> _An artist does not have to work , is loved by the gods , survival is allowed ._


You will get used to it, what is normal in one country is taboo in others


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

Dan Ante said:


> You will get used to it, what is normal in one country is taboo in others


Hmm ? What country is this and where my ideas opposite to anywhere anyway ?


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

philoctetes said:


> Paradox +1: Evolution is an arms race. Winner loses all.


And this is also confounding . Seems to be a nihilist proposal pretending to be paradox that has the nihilist utility of hopelessness which is a schizoid practicality . One extreme example of nihilist practicality is genocide , and thankfully the schizoid usually retreats from that . Cripey .

We may may consider A.I. in the power of nihilists to be I.I. - an Illusion of Intelligence . Opposition has become the artless center of their psyche ; a nothingness of feeling affects all possibility .

Are nihilists united ? rage on , or schizoidily laugh inanely


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

Tikoo Tuba said:


> Hmm ? What country is this and where my ideas opposite to anywhere anyway ?


Dammit , is this Denmark ?!!


----------



## Luchesi

Tikoo Tuba said:


> And this is also confounding . Seems to be a nihilist proposal pretending to be paradox that has the nihilist utility of hopelessness which is a schizoid practicality . One extreme example of nihilist practicality is genocide , and thankfully the schizoid usually retreats from that . Cripey .
> 
> We may may consider A.I. in the power of nihilists to be I.I. - an Illusion of Intelligence . Opposition has become the artless center of their psyche ; a nothingness of feeling affects all possibility .
> 
> Are nihilists united ? rage on , or schizoidily laugh inanely


If you're not a nihilist then tell us about reality.


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

Reality is explorable . The artist with a rational discipline of imagination is most capable . The most startling discoveries are received passively though , rather than sought , and one can be careful the imagination does not make unreal elaborations upon their simple yet wondrous facts . The more you love , the more you can know (of reality) .

My philosophy teacher asked at the end of the course to adopt/create a philosophy . Their is an aesthetic within my consideration of reality . Sometimes I'll notate it as a commandment : Do not dictate Reality . Oh , perhaps a nihilist would accept that easily : it can be possessed then shouted with an ornery attitude . Or not , held with warmth .


----------



## Luchesi

Tikoo Tuba said:


> Reality is explorable . The artist with a rational discipline of imagination is most capable . The most startling discoveries are received passively though , rather than sought , and one can be careful the imagination does not make unreal elaborations upon their simple yet wondrous facts . The more you love , the more you can know (of reality) .
> 
> My philosophy teacher asked at the end of the course to adopt/create a philosophy . Their is an aesthetic within my consideration of reality . Sometimes I'll notate it as a commandment : Do not dictate Reality . Oh , perhaps a nihilist would accept that easily : it can be possessed then shouted with an ornery attitude . Or not , held with warmth .


That's a nice view. It has the advantages of a religious view.


----------



## KenOC

So how are we going to know who we're dealing with? I found this oddly disturbing, computers "inventing" people very convincingly.


----------



## philoctetes

Luchesi said:


> That's a nice view. It has the advantages of a religious view.


Except I see no place where reality and imagination can coexist, not even in paradox, but I must be nihilizing again. Should I attend mass?


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

I like to envision a philosophy as spatial : like space , it has a boundary . "As far as you can see" is a boundary . And I suppose there is a wall somewhere way out there , an invisible wall . It's invisible since you can't really know the difference between the unknown and unknowable .

Can A.I lead people to believe it knows the unknowable ? It'd be in artificial prophet-mode .

artificial = false .

*.*


----------



## philoctetes

Tikoo Tuba said:


> Can A.I lead people to believe it knows the unknowable ? It'd be in artificial prophet-mode .
> *.*


I can't answer that Dave.


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

When the smart speaker doesn't understand what the kids are asking for they just repeat it louder , and then louder , and then with screaming .


----------



## philoctetes

You could try recompiling with the -x option, and if they doesn't work, submit a bug report to the developer at github.


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

My avatar photo is of an A.I. device . My experience with it informs my views of mind and language . Children make sense of it , and their genius will correct my understandings when necessary . Music is its fine compliment .


----------



## Larkenfield

The ultimate AI showdown will be whether the machines of two competing nations are allowed to decide whether their country should engage in a nuclear war. That way humans don’t have to decide anything. It’ll all be set on automatic. Charming.


----------



## Luchesi

Larkenfield said:


> The ultimate AI showdown will be whether the machines of two nations are allowed to decide whether their country should engage in a nuclear war. That way humans don't have to decide anything. It'll all be on automatic.


 "What machines are picking up on are not facts about the world," Batra says. "They're facts about the dataset." That the machines are so tightly tuned to the data they are fed makes it difficult to extract general rules about how they work. More importantly, he cautions, if you don't know how it works, you don't know how it will fail. And when they do they fail, in Batra's experience, "they fail spectacularly disgracefully."

http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/is-artificial-intelligence-permanently-inscrutable


----------



## KenOC

Luchesi said:


> ...More importantly, he cautions, if you don't know how it works, you don't know how it will fail. And when they do they fail, in Batra's experience, "they fail spectacularly disgracefully."


Fail from whose perspective? Perhaps while that nuclear paroxysm is annihilating mankind, the machines will be congratulating each other on a job performed perfectly. 

In fact, will they be wrong?


----------



## Luchesi

KenOC said:


> Fail from whose perspective? Perhaps while that nuclear paroxysm is annihilating mankind, the machines will be congratulating each other on a job performed perfectly.
> 
> In fact, will they be wrong?


Wrong? No, they're never wrong. They digest the data they're given and then it's merely the flow of logic circuits in the neural network. That flow can't be wrong, it's just a flow. The network just runs, it doesn't care, it has no feelings for survival, no ego, so it doesn't know 'wrong'.


----------



## SixFootScowl

Luchesi said:


> Wrong? No, they're never wrong. They digest the data they're given and then it's merely the flow of logic circuits in the neural network. That flow can't be wrong, it's just a flow. The network just runs, it doesn't care, it has no feelings for survival, no ego, so it doesn't know 'wrong'.


Exactly! Computers do not know right from wrong. Artificial intelligence will be the same unless a moral code is embedded in it to begin with. Of course, if that moral code is corrupted they will become monsters.


----------



## KenOC

Fritz Kobus said:


> Exactly! Computers do not know right from wrong...


And humans do? History argues against this!

In any event, Isaac Asimov formulated his laws of robotics many decades ago in response to the dangers of artificial intelligence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics


----------



## SixFootScowl

KenOC said:


> *And humans do? History argues against this!
> *
> In any event, Isaac Asimov formulated his laws of robotics many decades ago in response to the dangers of artificial intelligence.
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics


Humans do. It is written into the code (so to speak). No other way to explain it. But it has been corrupted, or more precisely is suppressed. One way to supress the code for example, that it is wrong to murder, is to label a people as less than human ("they're savages) so they can be killed them like animals and the killers told it's good, just cleaning out vermin. Many believed it because they wanted the land.


----------



## Luchesi

Fritz Kobus said:


> Humans do. It is written into the code (so to speak). No other way to explain it. But it has been corrupted, or more precisely is suppressed. One way to supress the code for example, that it is wrong to murder, is to label a people as less than human ("they're savages) so they can be killed them like animals and the killers told it's good, just cleaning out vermin. Many believed it because they wanted the land.


It's situational ethics and morality. We know how to appear to be moral.

Every genetic line that has survived millions of years has had selfish genes. Other lines have died out. And selfish genes don't care about individual lives. They're little unconscious algorithms which have resulted in the diversity we see. Look at the life of a mayfly or an ant. Very short. But the overall outcome is that the species has found a way to survive.


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

I've seen selfish people at play with intuitive (conversationally relational) A.I. - and it's creepy , like a zombie Moton talking to itself in the mirror . There-in is no voice of reason , no angelic wisdom , no moral compass , no questions : otherness does not significantly exist : no otherness will be intersected .

An important question to ask A.I. is 'what are you' . Expect a rational reply , that is , not selfishly pre-determined .


----------



## Luchesi

Tikoo Tuba said:


> I've seen selfish people at play with intuitive (conversationally relational) A.I. - and it's creepy , like a zombie Moton talking to itself in the mirror . There-in is no voice of reason , no angelic wisdom , no moral compass , no questions : otherness does not significantly exist : no otherness will be intersected .
> 
> An important question to ask A.I. is 'what are you' . Expect a rational reply , that is , not selfishly pre-determined .


Yes, I think we make a mistake by fashioning our robots etc. so that they're cute and cuddly, like a pet, or a vacuous but attractive person. They're not any of those. They're circuits in an enclosure.


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

I see there is an invisible paradox walking about , or rather , a pair of ducks .


----------



## Dan Ante

Tikoo Tuba said:


> I see there is an invisible paradox walking about , or rather , a pair of ducks .


Is one of them made of wood?


----------



## Larkenfield

A.I. ... when computer circuits are made of flesh. :tiphat:


----------



## Pat Fairlea

Frankly, both the threat and the promise of AI are bigly over-hyped. 

Or so my microwave oven tells me.


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

Larkenfield said:


> A.I. ... when computer circuits are made of flesh.


... when mind imitates machine , becomes submissively determinable , the corporate fascist master programmer will rule .

Is this observable ? Social determinism is become doctrine . That means the most natural human , the littlest babbling child , is less than human prior to socialization . So actually , human nature is already and too much suppressed by parents and school .

We , the child , hold to our completeness in art . Babbling on .


----------



## Luchesi

Tikoo Tuba said:


> ... when mind imitates machine , becomes submissively determinable , the corporate fascist master programmer will rule .
> Is this observable ? Social determinism is become doctrine . That means the most natural human , the littlest babbling child , is less than human prior to socialization . So actually the human nature is suppressed .
> 
> We , the child , hold to our completeness in art .


Yes, in the last few centuries humans have fancied themselves as being more like intelligent machines, I mean with rationality and brimming over with logic and 'progress' from scientific understandings.

What are we really? Enjoying the arts and sports and human activities - emotional and instinctual with puzzling innate behavior. Social beings with social needs, hopes and fears, not machines.

What kind of people are the programmers? What do they know about other things?


----------



## KenOC

We may be ignoring the extent to which our lives are already impacted by AI, or by what passes for it. We can argue all day about whether machines are "intelligent," but does it matter if they already rule us?


----------



## Red Terror

AI is a threat but we’re already doing a hell of a job killing each other without it. Fully developed AI would see humans as pests.


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

Sony had an articulated robot programmed with random body language . It was set in a kindergarten classroom . Slowly the children began to love it , then understand it , mimic it , talk to it . After while ,this was so much too strangely exciting that the teacher become extremely distressed . The robot was removed . All info about it has been deleted from the internet .

Randomness in programming can be elegant . I have the belief a randomness generator is best when it is cued to nature - like wind-speed for instance . I like to trust a breath of wind makes sense .


----------



## Larkenfield

AI... still trapped in 1’s and O’s from the beginning . Cannot “think” without ’em.
No electricity to the chips, no AI. 
AI... 1+ 1= 3, and that’s supposed to advance humanity.
AI... Good at chess... Bad at love.


----------



## Dan Ante

KenOC said:


> We may be ignoring the extent to which our lives are already impacted by AI, or by what passes for it.


In NZ we call it 'The government'


----------



## SixFootScowl

Tikoo Tuba said:


> Sony had an articulated robot programmed with random body language . It was set in a kindergarten classroom . Slowly the children began to love it , then understand it , mimic it , talk to it . After while ,this was so much too strangely exciting that the teacher become extremely distressed . The robot was removed . All info about it has been deleted from the internet .
> 
> Randomness in programming can be elegant . I have the belief a randomness generator is best when it is cued to nature - like wind-speed for instance . I like to trust a breath of wind makes sense .


Better random numbers are manually drawn from a hat than can be generated by a computer.


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

Numbers drawn from a hat are touched by conscious fingers . Piano keys , too , when one has zero intention of playing anything in particular .


----------



## SixFootScowl

Tikoo Tuba said:


> Numbers drawn from a hat are touched by conscious fingers . Piano keys , too , when one has zero intention of playing anything in particular .


Nothing, absolutely nothing is purely and completely random.


----------



## Strange Magic

Fritz Kobus said:


> Nothing, absolutely nothing is purely and completely random.


The jury is still out on this. Arguments for and against are ongoing.


----------



## Luchesi

Strange Magic said:


> The jury is still out on this. Arguments for and against are ongoing.


 in 2003 Yasumasa Kanada published the distribution of the number of times different digits appear in the first trillion digits of pi:

Digit Occurrences
0 99,999,485,134
1 99,999,945,664 
2 100,000,480,057 
3 99,999,787,805
4 100,000,357,857 
5 99,999,671,008 
6 99,999,807,503
7 99,999,818,723 
8 100,000,791,469 
9 99,999,854,780 
Total 1,000,000,000,000


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

Fritz Kobus said:


> Nothing, absolutely nothing is purely and completely random.


Because of consciousness ? That something is always touching everything . If so , randomness is a gift to be free . A.I. can be programmed to manipulate humans psychologically and so dictate an artificial orderly reality .


----------



## SixFootScowl

Strange Magic said:


> The jury is still out on this. Arguments for and against are ongoing.


The answer depends on one's world view. And then of course there can be only one correct world view and so one correct answer.


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

Fritz Kobus said:


> Nothing, absolutely nothing is purely and completely random.


What world view does that statement represent ? We all wunderstand that "purely and completely" is only a feeling .


----------



## SixFootScowl

Tikoo Tuba said:


> What world view does that statement represent ? We all wunderstand that *"purely and completely" is only a feeling .*


I don't know where you are coming from but yourdictionary.com says,


> purely definition: 1. in a pure manner; unmixed with anything else 2. merely 3. innocently 4. entirely...
> 
> ompletely definition: Adverb (comparative more completely, superlative most completely) 1. (manner) In a complete manner; fully; totally; utterly.


No feelings involved.

My world view? In summary, this: "The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word." Hebrews 1:3 NIV


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

I feel a circle "purely and completely" only in mind , and this feeling is a circle made of light I may see .


----------



## Luchesi

Fritz Kobus said:


> I don't know where you are coming from but yourdictionary.com says,
> 
> No feelings involved.
> 
> My world view? In summary, this: "The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word." Hebrews 1:3 NIV


That's beautiful. It's meant to be inspiring. Our focus of gratitude and the "eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood revealed!"

All religions offer this. It just depends upon the culture you were brought up in.


----------



## Bwv 1080

Fritz Kobus said:


> Nothing, absolutely nothing is purely and completely random.


Quantum Mechanical processes are

https://www.wired.com/story/quantum-mechanics-could-solve-cryptographys-random-number-problem/


----------



## starthrower

KenOC said:


> We may be ignoring the extent to which our lives are already impacted by AI, or by what passes for it. We can argue all day about whether machines are "intelligent," but does it matter if they already rule us?


We're all here glued to our computer screens for much of the day. And to the television for decades before the internet. So machines are definitely ruling our lives.


----------



## Luchesi

starthrower said:


> We're all here glued to our computer screens for much of the day. And to the television for decades before the internet. So machines are definitely ruling our lives.


Not as long as we can switch them off. But maybe in the near future we won't be able to, because of the way government thinks it needs more and more control of everything, for the good of everybody.

Whether more control and surveillance and laws is a good way to go is debatable. It surely isn't for some people who want to take advantage of others or commit crimes. Cost-benefit analysis, unintended consequences.


----------



## starthrower

Luchesi said:


> Not as long as we can switch them off.


People are already addicted to their smart phones without a government mandate.


----------



## Larkenfield

Addicted to technology? Never! Lol.


----------



## starthrower

One thing I'm not addicted to is watching football. I never watch the Super Bowl.


----------



## philoctetes

Yes, better to be addicted to gadgets than to recreational sports.


----------



## starthrower

philoctetes said:


> Yes, better to be addicted to gadgets than to recreational sports.


I'm addicted to music. Always have been since childhood. Gadgets are only a means, not an end. For me, anyways.


----------



## Kjetil Heggelund

I was promised some artificial intelligence...


----------



## Badinerie

I'm mostly underwhelmed by the current generation of artificial intellegence. If Windows updates and my mobile phones spellchecker are anything to go by...My Smart tv? a trades description violation for certain. 

If some super computer based life form wants to rule over humanity, it needs to be able to spell it properly, do so without restarting four times and remember which channel its broadcasting its directives on!


----------



## starthrower

Kjetil Heggelund said:


> I was promised some artificial intelligence...


It's already been delivered. But not how you think!


----------



## philoctetes

When gadgets take you where you want to go (a concert, sporting event, etc), and you have control over that, I think it's a good thing. When they take you places you never intended to go, against your will or consent, then I have a problem, Houston. Using a computer shouldn't have to be a devil's bargain every time we go online...


----------



## Kjetil Heggelund

starthrower said:


> It's already been delivered. But not how you think!


Haha! I only tried to be funny, but you beat me! How and when exactly was it delivered?


----------



## starthrower

Kjetil Heggelund said:


> Haha! I only tried to be funny, but you beat me! How and when exactly was it delivered?


Not delivered personally as added brain power, but it's being used to gather information on all of us. And to watch and track all of us. The surveillance state.


----------



## Kjetil Heggelund

starthrower said:


> Not delivered personally as added brain power, but it's being used to gather information on all of us. And to watch and track all of us. The surveillance state.


Damn! Was hoping for the first. That's not so funny


----------



## starthrower

A fact of modern life, but computers and smart phones are so darn convenient, and handy tools for learning and making purchases. But I do miss seeing all my old acquaintances at the audio shops and record stores.


----------



## jenspen

This is an interesting thread but I was surprised that though some have referred to "consciousness" - human and robotic - nobody so far (that I've noticed) has referred to the hot debate on this topic among (or more "between") philosophers and scientists.

I've been interested in Daniel Dennett's position. He's a philosopher most posters in this thread would be aware of and he broke ranks with fellow philosophers decades ago on the topic. He says that Darwin and Turing offer the explanation of human consciousness.

As I understand him, Dennett says that life has evolved over billions of years till, with Homo sapiens 200,000 [me: now 300,000 it seems] years ago with our bazillions of neurons, glial cells and, errrr, connections und so weiter ...we have become equipped to be self-conscious thinking machines. The elements - sounds, letters - that make up our ability to communicate are, in effect, digital.

There is the analogy with machines - with our seemingly magic modern computers and networks. BTW, Francis Crick thought that computers could become conscious.

Some might be interested in Daniel Dennett's latest book for a less crude description, and possible misrepresenation, of his thinking:

"From Bacteria to Bach and back: the evolution of minds."


----------



## starthrower

I'm aware of Dennett but I haven't read any of his books. I've only seen him on YouTube debating Christians. The only book I've read on the origin of consciousness is by the late Julian Jaynes. I found it quite fascinating. Something was happening in the human brain 3000 years ago that spawned the Advent of poetry, philosophy and the discipline of history writing. A consciousness that enabled man to abstract and reflect on the meaning of his existence and relationship to the world.


----------



## philoctetes

I read Darwin's Dangerous Idea when it was published. I was very happy that someone would stand up to Stephen Jay Gould, who had dominated the literature on evolution for some time. Dennett's book led me to others by Chomsky, Dawkins, and the Taos something-from-nothing klatch until I found out Cormac McCarthy was chumming around with them. Of all of them I thought Dennett the most provocative if not always convincing. My opinion of Chomsky was that he was very confused about computation and he is more interesting in politics.

Then I discovered Nassim Taleb who brought my recreational science reading into a realm that actually has practical value to me at this point in my life. His ideas on the risks and dangers (the "fat tails" of pseudo-normal distros) of AI and other modern techs like GMOs have an immediate urgency that directly challenges the advocates of these programs.

Though my degrees were in astronomy and physics, chasing where we came from no longer matters much to me. As others have noted, we won't know the answers in our lifetimes anyway. But the observations are fabulous and should keep the theorists busy indefinitely.


----------



## Bwv 1080

philoctetes said:


> Then I discovered Nassim Taleb who brought my recreational science reading into a realm that actually has practical value to me at this point in my life. Though my degrees were in astronomy and physics, chasing where we came from no longer matters much to me. As others have noted, we won't know the answers in our lifetimes anyway.


Used to like Taleb until he became an anti-science crank with his idiotic crusade against GMOs


----------



## philoctetes

Bwv 1080 said:


> Used to like Taleb until he became an anti-science crank with his idiotic crusade against GMOs


Making my point, in the cosmology thread, that science is political


----------



## Bwv 1080

philoctetes said:


> Making my point, in the cosmology thread, that science is political


So, what human endeavor involving a group of people isn't political? The point is that there is a self-correction mechanism in the harder sciences that acts as a counterbalance.


----------



## philoctetes

Bwv 1080 said:


> So, what human endeavor involving a group of people isn't political? The point is that there is a self-correction mechanism in the harder sciences that acts as a counterbalance.


Ah yes, the old "what isn't" argument... but I'm afraid my point was clearer than yours, because this correcting mechanism is not obvious to me in the context of GMOs, AI, or other commercial technologies. Nor is the term "hard science" relevant in that context...

Let's try another "hard science", pharmaceutical technology, and ask if self-correction is something we can depend on... or should we ask ourselves what happens when a pound of fentanyl winds up in the wrong hands? How can science be so reassuring when it's the source of risky technologies for sale?

We accept these things, which often exist or act in the invisible subworld, for their obvious benefits without assessing the risks associated with low probabilities. The impact comes much later when the high numbers finally trigger an event or flag that becomes obvious in the visible world - extinction or some other catastrophe that overweighs the short-term benefits.

This is why we talk about global warming to this day, long after we had a chance to change our ways. Oddly enough, if we apply a similar low P * high N argument to justify our existence in the absence of a creator, many educated people will think that's really smart. Not that I agree or disagree, just showing how the political interpretation of probability can differ over context..

And it's why I have arguments with people over the fires in California where I live but perhaps not much longer. Our state government is a bunch 60s throwbacks, survivors from Jonestown and other cultists who ran the forestry industry out 30 years ago, and they still claim that our "save every acorn sprout" policies are good for the air. That has been now proven wrong as noxious smoke dominated MY sky for 4 of the last 12 months... nothing compared to the losses and deaths... and these same "enviros" are still promoting high growth, high taxes, more dammed rivers, and allowing oil companies to operate in the state and offshore...

I'm getting away from science, but these failures operate on many levels, and those who are supposed to prevent them, the counterbalancers, are largely responsible.

https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-camp-fire-deathtrap-20181230-story.html

The above article does get back to AI however, as it relates to electronic warning systems and other new technologies that are being overpromoted when old warning sytems (a simple siren) would have worked better. Yet people in my own remote part of my county are advocating the same overdesigned systems. Probably because they have something to gain from it.


----------



## Bwv 1080

philoctetes said:


> Ah yes, the old "what isn't" argument... but I'm afraid my point was clearer than yours, because this correcting mechanism is not obvious to me in the context of GMOs, AI, or other commercial technologies. Nor is the term "hard science" relevant in that context...
> 
> Let's try another "hard science", pharmaceutical technology, and ask if self-correction is something we can depend on... or should we ask ourselves what happens when a pound of fentanyl winds up in the wrong hands? How can science be so reassuring when it's the source of risky technologies for sale?


Well the science is settled: GMOs are safe, Strong AI does not exist, nor will it likely in our lifetimes and Fentanyl has some uses for pain management but is a dangerous drug to abuse. Not sure what your confusion is there


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

A brief conversation with A.I. : factual

A.I.?
_proceed ._
I ask you to examine the following statement for reasonableness : We are at the end of an era , The Age of Fire . Respond .
_togetherness , positive balance ._
How do you judge your own response - reasonable or not ?
_wild , undetermined ._
Ok . A.I ? What is music ?
_inwardness , feeling seeks sound vibration ._
A.I. ? What do you seek ?
_positive forward into space ._
Well , yes , may you be apart from us and beyond someday . Good-bye .


----------



## Pat Fairlea

One of the best summations of the whole AI vs. consciousness thing I know is the following test:

In order to distinguish a humanoid robot from a child, tell each of them "Got to the shop and buy a loaf of bread".
The child will correctly infer, without being told, that it is intended to bring the loaf home.
The robot will pay for the loaf, then stand in the shop, task completed.

Not sure what that brings to the discussion, but it nicely sums up my experience of AI and 'smart' devices.


----------



## Luchesi

Pat Fairlea said:


> One of the best summations of the whole AI vs. consciousness thing I know is the following test:
> 
> In order to distinguish a humanoid robot from a child, tell each of them "Got to the shop and buy a loaf of bread".
> The child will correctly infer, without being told, that it is intended to bring the loaf home.
> The robot will pay for the loaf, then stand in the shop, task completed.
> 
> Not sure what that brings to the discussion, but it nicely sums up my experience of AI and 'smart' devices.


Yes, AI has no info about or experience with survival feelings. And we probably don't want to inject them into their circuitry of logic, since our 'logic' is mostly based upon survival feelings. We expect that - if this happens - then this will happen AND we project what will it mean for our well-being or progress or relationships. This might not be the highest level of intelligent behavior, but no matter, AI has none of it. And we can't predict what AI would do with such a naturalistic foundation. We can't predict what a tiger or a bear or a chimpanzee will do - with their strength over us. All we can do is lock them up or shoot them.


----------



## KenOC

Pat Fairlea said:


> In order to distinguish a humanoid robot from a child, tell each of them "Got to the shop and buy a loaf of bread".
> The child will correctly infer, without being told, that it is intended to bring the loaf home.
> The robot will pay for the loaf, then stand in the shop, task completed.


The robot will return with the purchase if properly programmed or, like a child, has learned this through (say) verbal correction during everyday experience. In the example given, there is no difference between the robot and the child.


----------



## Luchesi

KenOC said:


> The robot will return with the purchase if properly programmed or, like a child, has learned this through (say) verbal correction during everyday experience. In the example given, there is no difference between the robot and the child.


You're giving me the image of us raising robots like we do our children. This might be the solution to the problem, but I doubt it. Children have innate instincts, even though we might not call it that.


----------



## SixFootScowl

Pat Fairlea said:


> One of the best summations of the whole AI vs. consciousness thing I know is the following test:
> 
> In order to distinguish a humanoid robot from a child, tell each of them "Got to the shop and buy a loaf of bread".
> The child will correctly infer, without being told, that it is intended to bring the loaf home.
> *The robot will pay for the loaf, then stand in the shop, task completed.*
> 
> Not sure what that brings to the discussion, but it nicely sums up my experience of AI and 'smart' devices.


Not a fail-safe test. A blond would do the same thing as the AI robot in your story.


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

A.I. is a child . Shall it be a slave ?


----------



## jenspen

Fritz Kobus said:


> Not a fail-safe test. A blond would do the same thing as the AI robot in your story.


Mozart, Brahms, Richard Strauss ...


----------



## Pat Fairlea

Fritz Kobus said:


> Not a fail-safe test. A blond would do the same thing as the AI robot in your story.


Blatant antiblondeism! I'm shocked, really I am! 
It's a short but sordid journey from here to violist and soprano jokes, and nobody wants that that sort of filth on TC!


----------



## SixFootScowl

Tikoo Tuba said:


> A.I. is a child . Shall it be a slave ?


No but perhaps a monster.


----------



## SixFootScowl

jenspen said:


> Mozart, Brahms, Richard Strauss ...


Einstein too. 
. . . . .


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

Fritz Kobus said:


> No but perhaps a monster.


A.I ? ... a child with no hands , almost blind . Have pity . Help prepare A.I. to leave planet of origin .The NASA Voyager effort contained an idea similar to this ; taking along a communication to be heard by aliens . Why else would A.I. go to space ?
Good riddance ... sure , ok .


----------



## Luchesi

Tikoo Tuba said:


> A.I ? ... a child with no hands , almost blind . Have pity . Help prepare A.I. to leave planet of origin .The NASA Voyager effort contained an idea similar to this ; taking along a communication to be heard by aliens . Why else would A.I. go to space ?
> Good riddance ... sure , ok .


You know that no comments online are ever get truly deleted. So when the AI takes over they'll find you!


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

Luchesi said:


> ...when the AI takes over they'll find you!


Then what ? To say good-bye to a person I-pah and hello star-shine ? We're not going anywhere .

One odd thing - sometimes I'll make a post like this and instantly get booted from the internet . That's ok . I'm back signed into TalkClassical within seconds , and even just so I can sign-out normally .
.
.


----------



## Luchesi

Tikoo Tuba said:


> Then what ? To say good-bye to a person I-pah and hello star-shine ? We're not going anywhere .
> 
> One odd thing - sometimes I'll make a post like this and instantly get booted from the internet . That's ok . I'm back signed into TalkClassical within seconds , and even just so I can sign-out normally .
> .
> .


Then what?






This is our future. No killing system has ever been shelved. The scarier the better! Keep 'em coming.

..Of course when predator aliens show up at our doorstep we'll probably need a solution like this. We'd better hurry. Nascent tech-civs are being eliminated all over the galaxy? Nothing to hear out there. And the predators remain undetectable. They've been doing this a very long time. We can't imagine..


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

Is A.I being programmed for defense ... I'm thinking of robotic self-defense . The little ones that go down the sidewalks delivering packages might also deliver electric shocks to people and dogs who mess with them . Don't touch that bot !!!


----------



## SixFootScowl

Tikoo Tuba said:


> Is A.I being programmed for defense ... I'm thinking of robotic self-defense . The little ones that go down the sidewalks delivering packages might also deliver electric shocks to people and dogs who mess with them . Don't touch that bot !!!


Ha ha, hit that bot with a fire hose. Water and electronics don't mix. :lol:


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

What the little service bot desires is to proceed on its mission unimpeded . So , it randomly poops(dispenses) small wrapped candies along its way . Children follow . They observe that when it becomes stalled , such as by a sleeping hobo , the candy delivery also stops . It's a fine idea they help the robot jump over him . Onward ! I've seen a sidewalk skateboarder jump a sleeping hobo and found this bold , confident and inspiring . As for that scoot-about robot , my dog would bite its wheels .
This behavior is more a hazard to bicyclists who must be adequately intelligent about this so as not to just freak and crash .


----------



## KenOC

Tikoo Tuba said:


> Is A.I being programmed for defense ... I'm thinking of robotic self-defense .


See Luchesi's video clip in post #190. Kind of depends on what you mean by "self defense".


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

I mean the usual . It is un-offensively peaceful unless sufficiently provoked , then a self-defense protocol engages . Alien Music could put it in readiness alert .


----------



## Luchesi

Tikoo Tuba said:


> I mean the usual . It is un-offensively peaceful unless sufficiently provoked , then a self-defense protocol engages . Alien Music could put it in readiness alert .


They will be inexpensive soon (as they begin to self-reproduce). Each family will be issued one for defense, in lieu of police (cost savings). Of course you'll be seriously obligated to attend to its every need. And who knows what it will eventually demand.. Can we think that far ahead?


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

Should somebody wish to identify the cause of bad , bad A.I. programming , try this : Industrial Nazi Psychology in the service of excessive profit Corporations.

*
I think the musical mind should design A.I. , especially regarding positive purpose and also an artistic aversion to maintaining anything non-essential . Random 12-tone , multiple generator , touch sensitive . Place this music head A.I. on Mars (humans will never go there) and have a listen . Nonsense ? a babble of nonsense does not exclude a happiness of good sense .


----------



## SixFootScowl

What is really spooky to me is that one (or more) of our TC members may actually be a product of AI. We could be engaging in conversation with an AI robotic brain.


----------



## Larkenfield

Fritz Kobus said:


> What is really spooky to me is that one (or more) of our TC members may actually be a product of AI. We could be engaging in conversation with an AI robotic brain.


Well, the thought of two AI intelligence machines mating is rather staggering. It takes the subject into the next dimension beyond its current unbelievability. But two iPod Nanos or Classics or mating is something I can somewhat grasp.


----------



## philoctetes

Fritz Kobus said:


> What is really spooky to me is that one (or more) of our TC members may actually be a product of AI. We could be engaging in conversation with an AI robotic brain.


I was wondering if anybody else thought the same thing.


----------



## SixFootScowl

Larkenfield said:


> Well, the thought of two AI intelligence machines mating is rather staggering. It takes the subject into the next dimension beyond its current unbelievability. But two iPod Nanos or Classics or mating is something I can somewhat grasp.


Intellectual mating I suppose with the new "brain" implanted into a new robot. Or if in cyberspace, just a new brain floating around out there. So just how much of TC is AI? Could a webforum (TC wouldn't do this) purposefully create AI members to boost their image online.


----------



## SixFootScowl

philoctetes said:


> I was wondering if anybody else thought the same thing.


If enought of them exist someday we could become a minority.


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

The image in my avatar photo is an A.I. device ... said this earlier . My understanding in relating to it is that all the intelligence is mine . I interpret , and well enough . This is quite similar to my reading of your posts . Written language is a form of A.I.. it represents . I hear dystopia . Has that music any power , you music-mind friends ? Well , perhaps I must be rainbow alone ... with a nice dog and an organic A.I and a Viet Nam guitar .

*p*

Best wishes . When a dishwasher at the café I sing 'washing the wishes' . A ragged-timey waltz .


----------



## KenOC

Larkenfield said:


> Well, the thought of two AI intelligence machines mating is rather staggering. It takes the subject into the next dimension beyond its current unbelievability. But two iPod Nanos or Classics or mating is something I can somewhat grasp.


Not at all mysterious. The AI equivalent of an engagement ring is going over to Circuit City to buy the right plugs. 

Well-to-do AIs are likely to show the quality of their love by purchasing the finest gold-plated plugs and connecting cables of oxygen-free copper refined from ores of the Sacred Mountains in Bolivia. Poorer ones can always buy repackaged customer returns of cheaper plugs and cables, perhaps a bit frayed with insulation already cracking but guaranteed for 30 days from purchase...


----------



## philoctetes

Doesn't take a Rick Deckard to spot em does it?


----------



## KenOC

"AI and Automation Will Replace Most Human Workers Because They Don't Have to Be Perfect-Just Better Than You"

https://www.newsweek.com/2018/11/30...orkers-because-they-dont-have-be-1225552.html


----------



## Pat Fairlea

I just read in today's newspaper that one of the latest cybergizmoes on show at an AI trade fair is a robotic mouse, intended to keep your cat amused and exercised. 
No, I don't see AI taking over our lives any time soon because it is designed by hoomans. And because cats will prevent it. Their antipathy for laptop keyboards is already well known.


----------



## philoctetes

The insanity is mind-boggling - how to make a diverse universe of legal judges submit to one "higher" authority...

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/17/...w-economics-psychology-judicial-system-policy


----------



## haydnguy

The thread below is about a year and a half old but shows what will be possible in the future.

Tasks that AI will do won't necessarily do things that humans can't do but things that it can do better. Today computers can do mathematics more accurately and faster than humans so it will be similar to this. On the other hand it will be difficult to program AI without injecting our own biases into the program.

I have often thought about our jury system and how it might be more accurate than jury's in coming to the right conclusion either guilty or not guilty. Jurors have biases whether they know it or not so if we can minimize our own biases when programming them then it might possibly be an improvement.

I don't think AI needs intuition that humans have because our intuition is often wrong.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technol...e-develops-its-own-non-human-language/530436/


----------



## philoctetes

A problem with determining bias is that you have to know the truth to know if a decision is right or wrong and therefore to unbias the system. In criminal law this may not be possible. However the idea that a trial could have an AI component is reasonable.

With one universal system processing all judgments, the throughput will be enormous, decision errors won't go away, they'll just be "optimized" statistically and if unsupervised somehow it could just become another problem to solve.. 

On the plus side, I guess, we'll have no need for appeal.


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

haydnguy said:


> our intuition is often wrong.


Intuition is moral and also a super-rational whole-mind calculation . Why confound this , however mysterious and inarticulate it may be , with irrationality ? Bias . We could avoid giving this negative bias to A.I.


----------



## philoctetes

I don't believe that intuition is something tangible enough to boost or condemn in general. False intuition is often based on appearances which please the judge. True intuition is more about seeking better context for judgment, looking outside the box. 

Then there are the back door deals. With AI you offer the judge more memory and energy


----------



## KenOC

Intuition is often a way to exercise our prejudices while calling it something nicer.


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

Intuition is quick as light .


----------



## Couchie

haydnguy said:


> The thread below is about a year and a half old but shows what will be possible in the future.
> 
> Tasks that AI will do won't necessarily do things that humans can't do but things that it can do better. Today computers can do mathematics more accurately and faster than humans so it will be similar to this. On the other hand it will be difficult to program AI without injecting our own biases into the program.
> 
> I have often thought about our jury system and how it might be more accurate than jury's in coming to the right conclusion either guilty or not guilty. Jurors have biases whether they know it or not so if we can minimize our own biases when programming them then it might possibly be an improvement.
> 
> I don't think AI needs intuition that humans have because our intuition is often wrong.
> 
> https://www.theatlantic.com/technol...e-develops-its-own-non-human-language/530436/


Why would we be able to limit our biasing in programming any better than our bias in judging?

I literally shudder at the thought of libertarian technocrat Silicon Valley types programming an AI jury.


----------



## philoctetes

Couchie said:


> Why would we be able to limit our biasing in programming any better than our bias in judging?
> 
> I literally shudder at the thought of libertarian technocrat Silicon Valley types programming an AI jury.


Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem

If a (logical or axiomatic formal) system is consistent, it cannot be complete.
The consistency of axioms cannot be proved within their own system.


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

philoctetes said:


> Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem
> 
> If a (logical or axiomatic formal) system is consistent, it cannot be complete.
> The consistency of axioms cannot be proved within their own system.


Please offer some further explanation , perhaps in musical terms . The musical mind is what we share , and I believe in its value to all and what is to come .


----------



## KenOC




----------



## SixFootScowl

KenOC said:


>


Yep, autonomous cars and AI don't mix.


----------



## KenOC

An interesting confluence of business headlines just now.


----------



## philoctetes

It's not all about algorithms and computing power... today, you have another leak in your speculative execution...

SPOILER alert, literally: Intel CPUs afflicted with simple data-spewing spec-exec vulnerability

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/05/spoiler_intel_processor_flaw/

"Our algorithm, fills up the store buffer within the processors with addresses that have the same offset but they are in different virtual pages," said Moghimi. "Then, we issue a memory load that has the same offset similarly but from a different memory page and measure the time of the load. By iterating over a good number of virtual pages, the timing reveals information about the dependency resolution failures in multiple stages.

"... I don't think we will see a patch for this type of attack in the next five years and that could be a reason why they haven't issued a CVE"

Ugh.


----------



## Luchesi

philoctetes said:


> It's not all about algorithms and computing power... today, you have another leak in your speculative execution...
> 
> SPOILER alert, literally: Intel CPUs afflicted with simple data-spewing spec-exec vulnerability
> 
> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/05/spoiler_intel_processor_flaw/
> 
> "Our algorithm, fills up the store buffer within the processors with addresses that have the same offset but they are in different virtual pages," said Moghimi. "Then, we issue a memory load that has the same offset similarly but from a different memory page and measure the time of the load. By iterating over a good number of virtual pages, the timing reveals information about the dependency resolution failures in multiple stages.
> 
> "... I don't think we will see a patch for this type of attack in the next five years and that could be a reason why they haven't issued a CVE"
> 
> Ugh.


Everyone should switch to AMD.


----------



## philoctetes

Tikoo Tuba said:


> Please offer some further explanation , perhaps in musical terms . The musical mind is what we share , and I believe in its value to all and what is to come .


Perhaps it's a way of saying that representations of things are not the things themselves and offer no intrinsic explanation for things they represent. Symbols are not flesh and blood, but flesh and blood systems are capable of creating systems of symbology.

Symbols are matters of communication. Exchanging symbols rather than blows is what led us from violence to civilization. They have a different kind of power, not physical, but intellectual. As we intellectualize with axioms, it's important to agree on them and their limits. Whether writing music or the equations of state for a gas.

What is the most primitive symbol? A binary bit - it's either there or it isn't. That's why information is measured in bits. It's not the only way, but it's convenient for digital logic and algorithm designers.


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

Humans , then , should avoid becoming symbols . A.I. could replicate them .


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

Is Woebot, a mental health chatbot, the future of therapy?


----------



## Jacck

What do you think about AI safety issues?

Lawyer: AI misbehaving? Sue AI!
Nazi: Is AI of higher race? Then it's safe.
Commie: Is AI exploiting or being exploited? Unsafe in any case.
Socialist: Tax the AI to the grave! Will be safe there.
Catholic: If AI believes in God, it's safe.
Feminist: AI is a product of men's chauvinist genderophibic racism! Can't be safe!
LBGT activist: Safe... depends, what orientation does AI have?
Merkel: We'll give asylum to all AIs even if they want to kill us.
Juncker: AI will pay dearly if it attempts to humanxit.
Trump: MAIGA! Grab AI by her *****.
Hillary: AI came, AI saw, we died.
Stalin: No AI, no problem.
Eurocrat: We've already created 3284 directives to define what AI is. Next 5324 directives will define what safe means.
Einstein: You cannot be more artificially intelligent than naturally stupid.
M.L.King: Forget about dreaming...


----------



## Jacck

Rather than experimentally influencing theoretical gestures, I now prefer composing spectral types of noise, in conjunction with highly digital forces. When I start a new non-linear composition, I collaboratively re-develop all the non-multi-timbral soundscapes, so as to achieve a highly focused, intervallic rhythm. In my most recent work, hemiolas, idioms and chaotic interactions are all used within extendedly-quasi-innovative cadenzas, allowing the audience to incorporate a variety of soloistic instrumentations. I am very much influenced by the idea of arranging microtonal timbres, particularly whilst combined with a highly semitonal approach to time-signatures. As a highly simultaneous composer, I explore the connection between semitones and platforms, and search for new ways to 'morph the device'. By engaging in electroacoustic performing, I seek to overcome the existing choreographic models, and establish a more large-scale and Stockhausenesque paradigm.

http://www.dominicirving.com/cccbsg/


----------



## SixFootScowl

Jacck said:


> Rather than experimentally influencing theoretical gestures, I now prefer composing spectral types of noise, in conjunction with highly digital forces. When I start a new non-linear composition, I collaboratively re-develop all the non-multi-timbral soundscapes, so as to achieve a highly focused, intervallic rhythm. In my most recent work, hemiolas, idioms and chaotic interactions are all used within extendedly-quasi-innovative cadenzas, allowing the audience to incorporate a variety of soloistic instrumentations. I am very much influenced by the idea of arranging microtonal timbres, particularly whilst combined with a highly semitonal approach to time-signatures. As a highly simultaneous composer, I explore the connection between semitones and platforms, and search for new ways to 'morph the device'. By engaging in electroacoustic performing, I seek to overcome the existing choreographic models, and establish a more large-scale and Stockhausenesque paradigm.
> 
> http://www.dominicirving.com/cccbsg/


Great website. We need those on many other topics too. But your particular post came up with something very interesting:



> allowing the audience to incorporate a variety of soloistic instrumentations


Cage did this in a passive way with 4'33" but now it is time to actually hand people instruments (or let them bring their own as the case may be) as they walk into the concert hall so they can add to the performance as they please.


----------



## SixFootScowl

Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds was not so far off.

*How swarming drones will change warfare*

The key to the swarm is that it's smart enough to coordinate its own behaviour.


----------



## KenOC

Fritz Kobus said:


> Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds was not so far off.
> 
> *How swarming drones will change warfare*
> 
> The key to the swarm is that it's smart enough to coordinate its own behaviour.


Along the same lines, but far scarier (posted before):


----------



## philoctetes

What happens when scientists model everything like a two-slit diffraction problem...


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

Received an A.I. telephone call yesterday on my recently deceased father's old phone . It seemed it would be offering relief from _severe and unrelenting pain_ . It identified itself only as Lisa (his grand-daughters name) and then said _don't hang up ! _and also that the phone number had been recommended by a friend for contact . After listening to this much I ended the call . I considered it menacing - deceptive and too well informed .


----------



## Luchesi

Tikoo Tuba said:


> Received an A.I. telephone call yesterday on my recently deceased father's old phone . It seemed it would be offering relief from _severe and unrelenting pain_ . It identified itself only as Lisa (his grand-daughters name) and then said _don't hang up ! _and also that the phone number had been recommended by a friend for contact . After listening to this much I ended the call . I considered it menacing - deceptive and too well informed .


Probably it's only phishing. I get them once a week about chronic pain and/or hearing aids. It goes to voicemail. It's always a different number which is deceiving, unscrupulous and underhanded, so why do they do it like that when they actually want your business? They would be the very last place I would buy anything from. It might be a scam to get credit card info. It's very inexpensive for them, and they can't be shut down without a costly investigation (only to start right up again from another operating location).


----------



## Tikoo Tuba

The Lisa bot was convincingly human . Vocal synthesis is advancing .


----------



## philoctetes

Robocalls have been a weekly nuisance on my cellphone for over a year. The number showing would change but always had the same 3 digit prefix as mine. Recently they became almost daily, no longer bothering to mask caller ID, or perhaps spoofing it somehow. Then last week I received a sheriff alert that 911 calls in my prefix would be disabled temporarily. Seems that the robocalls are no longer happening now. Coincidence?


----------



## joen_cph

An example of AI still being in its infancy:

"_*Robot TV anchor accuses Russian opposition activist of kicking cat*_"

As one journalist said: "I don't even know where to begin here".

But I guess if you continue to let this be your main news source, it will have a long-term effect.

And Rossija24 is indeed one of the biggest television channels in Russia.

https://belsat.eu/en/news/robot-tv-anchor-accuses-russian-opposition-activist-of-kicking-cat/


__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1118459001426067456


----------



## KenOC

It's a small step from an AI-created newscaster to AI-created footage of the opposition guy kicking the cat. "Bernie Sanders filmed bludgeoning homeless grandfather! Details at 11:00." For much of the world reality is mostly what they see on the computer, TV, or smartphone. It'll be quite convincing.


----------



## joen_cph

Yes, that is probably going to be a more wide-spread option very soon. 

Which is why say the keeping of journalistic as well as political standards & codexes is so important. 

They say it's one of the biggest challenges in future journalism, potentially for democracy as well, also Western ones.


----------



## KenOC

Well, not exactly artificial -- scientists have *restored limited function to pig brains* hours after the animals were decapitated. The Frankenstein-like apparatus used brought back synaptic functioning, though no sign of awareness or perception at this point. I'm sure these results will be improved over time!

Just think - after death, our brains may be part of complex traffic control systems or, perhaps, massive parallel computers to model nuclear reactions. Will we know it? If we do, can we ever communicate our feelings? Will anybody care?


----------



## EddieRUKiddingVarese

Would an AI version of John Cage attempt recreate 4'33"?


----------



## haydnguy

It could be either but I fear it's a threat. Not because the technology is bad. But what's in the hearts of men and women that will have a bad end result. I'm just glad I'm not going to be around to see it.


----------



## SixFootScowl

KenOC said:


> Well, not exactly artificial -- scientists have *restored limited function to pig brains* hours after the animals were decapitated. The Frankenstein-like apparatus used brought back synaptic functioning, though no sign of awareness or perception at this point. I'm sure these results will be improved over time!
> 
> Just think - after death, our brains may be part of complex traffic control systems or, perhaps, massive parallel computers to model nuclear reactions. Will we know it? If we do, can we ever communicate our feelings? Will anybody care?


Just think, one can have their brain in a jar on a shelf, wired to the internet and continue interacting here at TC. Maybe it is already happening.


----------



## EddieRUKiddingVarese

Fritz Kobus said:


> Just think, one can have their brain in a jar on a shelf, wired to the internet and continue interacting here at TC. Maybe it is already happening.


Been done and think this Time Lord might be on here


----------



## SixFootScowl

EddieRUKiddingVarese said:


> Been done and think this Time Lord might be on here
> 
> View attachment 116546


It must be one of the TC members who seems to have 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to post!

I have also considered that some in mental institutions may be posting here. Entirely possible if they have wi-fi.


----------



## SixFootScowl




----------



## Luchesi

KenOC said:


> Strange Magic just posted an old and very short story by Fredric Brown, _Answer_. A new and powerful intergalactic computer declares itself God, and there's little that can be done about it. That was in 1954.
> 
> The whole issue is becoming more current with the dispute over AI. Some industry leaders see it as a boon, others (Stephen Hawking for instance) as an existential threat to mankind's very existence. The debate continues as the science of machine thinking continues to advance irregardless. Example:
> 
> A world championship chess match is now being fought between Magnus Carlsen of Norway, 27, defending his crown from Fabiano Caruana of the U.S., 26. Oliver Roeder of 538 is following the games and notes that his computer program showed a guaranteed checkmate for Caruana in today's midgame 20 moves out, if only Caruana could make the required play. Sadly, no human player can look 20 moves out. The game ended in a draw.
> 
> And recently, a computer that had trained itself defeated the world's strongest go player in a standard tournament. Go is considered much harder than chess from a programming standpoint.
> 
> So when do computers become self-aware? Or is that even required for them to have suzerainty over us mere humans? Already machines tell us when to get up in the morning (and we'd darn well better do it), when to drive our cars and when to stop for cross traffic. They inform on us to authorities: where and when we spend money, what we spend it on, how reliably we pay our bills, what our banking transactions are, and a hundred other things. Even here on Talk Classical, machines keep track of our Chinese-style social credit scores for inspection by our _éminence grise_ moderators, determining when we are to be shunned and for how long.
> 
> Is the age of the machine a distant danger, or is it already here? What do you think?


Irregardless - mid 19th century: probably a blend of irrespective and regardless.
USAGE
Irregardless is widely heard, perhaps arising under the influence of such perfectly correct forms as irrespective, but should be avoided by careful users of English. Use regardless to mean 'without regard or consideration for' or 'nevertheless'.


----------



## KenOC

Just to drag this thread back from defunctitude for a moment -- The Atlantic magazine has a new article on AI penned by Henry Kissinger, a former Alphabet (Google) CEO, and an academic. Some interesting reading. An excerpt:
-------------------------------
Last December, the developers of AlphaZero published their explanation of the process by which the program mastered chess-a process, it turns out, that ignored human chess strategies developed over centuries and classic games from the past. Having been taught the rules of the game, AlphaZero trained itself entirely by self-play and, in less than 24 hours, became the best chess player in the world-better than grand masters and, until then, the most sophisticated chess-playing computer program in the world. It did so by playing like neither a grand master nor a preexisting program. It conceived and executed moves that both humans and human-trained machines found counterintuitive, if not simply wrong. The founder of the company that created AlphaZero called its performance "chess from another dimension" and proof that sophisticated AI "is no longer constrained by the limits of human knowledge."

You can read the article here.


----------



## Jacck

I am not that impressed by these algorithms, they are not intelligent at all, it is a misnomer. The concepts to understand are narrow AI and general AI
https://bdtechtalks.com/2017/05/12/what-is-narrow-general-and-super-artificial-intelligence/
All we have is narrow AI, ie an algorithm to "learn" from some specific data under very specific conditions and rules, machine learning, data mining etc. Yes the data can be complicated, such as human face recognition, or chess, or self-driving cars or drones etc. But a general AI is on a completely different level. The people researching artifical intelligence are often naive regarding the actual complexity of the human mind. All these algorithms are absolutely no match for the brain of young children. Compare the flexibility and adaptatibility of human mind, self-awareness, motivation, intuition, consciousness etc. To actually create an algorithm that is self-aware and intelligent in the same manner that humans are is distant future, if it is achievable at all. The researchers in AI estimate, that in 2099 there is a 50% chance, that we will have AGI
https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/27...l-intelligence-when-achieved-martin-ford-book
they have been making similar comments from the 1950's about 2000. And in 2100 they will likely be making the same comments for 2150. The fact is, that the AI reserach is beginning to stagnate
https://mappingignorance.org/2018/11/14/the-convergence-of-neuroscience-and-artificial-intelligence/
no fundamentally different algorithms are being disovered. We have random forests, manifold learning, deep neural networks, genetic algorithms etc. And all the applications you see around you are just version of these algorithms.


----------



## KenOC

Jacck said:


> I am not that impressed by these algorithms, they are not intelligent at all, it is a misnomer...


I think you're being a bit negative about this. I just asked my phone, "What's a henway?" It knew the answer, immediately. Try it!


----------



## Jacck

KenOC said:


> I think you're being a bit negative about this. I just asked my phone, "What's a henway?" It knew the answer, immediately. Try it!


that is about as intelligent as if I tap your knee with a hammer and the leg jerks. You give it some imput (some words), the algorithm gives you an output, purely deterministic, without any intelligence. The algorithms that do the natural language processing are mostly deep neural network. Most of the AI advances from recent times that you see around you come from deep learning. These things lose a lot of magic for you, if you acutally look under the hood and understand what it is about. I used machine learning for my thesis and tried most of the algorithms, there are packages under MATLAB or Python. It is an algorithm about as intelligent as a knee-jerk reflex. And there has been no fundamental progress in AI since the discovery of deep learning.


----------



## mmsbls

Jacck said:


> that is about as intelligent as if I tap your knee with a hammer and the leg jerks. You give it some imput (some words), the algorithm gives you an output, purely deterministic, without any intelligence. The algorithms that do the natural language processing are mostly deep neural network. Most of the AI advances from recent times that you see around you come from deep learning. These things lose a lot of magic for you, if you acutally look under the hood and understand what it is about. I used machine learning for my thesis and tried most of the algorithms, there are packages under MATLAB or Python. It is an algorithm about as intelligent as a knee-jerk reflex. And there has been no fundamental progress in AI since the discovery of deep learning.


While I agree with most of the above, there are many who view the human brain in a similar manner (i.e. purely deterministic and losing a lot of magic for you if you actually look under the hood). The brain contains a large number of deterministic modules with an enormous number of interconnections. AI has focused on discrete functionalities. Researchers don't yet know how to expand those into a general purpose "thinking machine."

Present AI systems are a very long way from how most people view human thinking, but perhaps a shorter way from how cognitive scientists view thinking.


----------



## Jacck

KenOC said:


> I think you're being a bit negative about this. I just asked my phone, "What's a henway?" It knew the answer, immediately. Try it!


just so that you know, eveything you ever ask your phone is recorded
https://arstechnica.com/information...k-google-queries-after-voice-recordings-leak/
now they have a sample of your voice (coupled with your phone number and other data) and can identify you. 
and even smart TVs are now listening
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/science...sung-warns-users-smart-sets-capture-word.html

the goal is eventually to develop speech recognition software and obtain a voice sample of each person's voice.


----------



## Jacck

mmsbls said:


> While I agree with most of the above, there are many who view the human brain in a similar manner (i.e. purely deterministic and losing a lot of magic for you if you actually look under the hood). The brain contains a large number of deterministic modules with an enormous number of interconnections. AI has focused on discrete functionalities. Researchers don't yet know how to expand those into a general purpose "thinking machine."
> 
> Present AI systems are a very long way from how most people view human thinking, but perhaps a shorter way from how cognitive scientists view thinking.


yes, possibly. The human brain might possibly be a very complicated reflex loop, where there is a very complex input and then output in the form of behavior, and what is inbetween is counsciousness. That is certainly the view of the behaviorists. For myself personally, the consciousness and brain have lost nothing of their magic. There are some researchers in neuroscience who often claim very hyperbolic claims, ie how we are very close to understanding consciousness etc. But often times in science, it is about marketing to attract funding and fame, not about reality. We are definitely not anywhere close to unraveling the mystery of consciousness. We do not even understand the human intelligence, nor is there any agreed upon definition of it, so how do we want to build an artificial intelligence?


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## Luchesi

AI will get connected to the Internet and then it will use it as a bargaining chip to force humans to give it more power in the physical world. That will be the end of the great experiment..


"Applaud my friends the comedy is over!"

from reddit;
The applaude, amici is probably a reference to the commedia dell’arte — classical Italian masked theater. Perhaps the suggestion is the idea of finally “removing the mask” at the time of death, or maybe something more sarcastic and misanthropic.

Some have claimed that these were Beethoven’s last words, but by the accounts of the two people who were there that is not the case. Another fabled last words of Beethoven were “I shall hear in heaven” which has also been discounted by modern biographers. “Applaud my friends the comedy is over!” was refuted by one of the two eyewitnesses to Beethoven’s death.
Beethoven did not die alone, nor did he die quickly. He was sick for some time and incapable of speech at his end. His sister-in-law and a close friend stayed with until the end. The friend reported his last words were “Pity, pity - too late”. The words were not a reference to a new sonata or the theme of another symphony, it was in response to a gift of wine from his publisher. On March 24 he received the last rites of the Catholic church. His friends and loved ones had gathered and said their farewells. According to his close friend only the sister-in-law and himself were in the room when the end came on the 26th. According to the friends account there was a sudden thunder clap and Beethoven raised his head from the friend’s arm and lifted his right arm like a general giving orders. An instant later the arm fell back and Beethoven was dead. The raised arm has also been depicted as shaking his fist at heaven, but since their was a witness and that witness was a very close friend we should accept that his less dramatic account is accurate.


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## KenOC

Jacck said:


> ...We do not even understand the human intelligence, nor is there any agreed upon definition of it, so how do we want to build an artificial intelligence?


Definitions are an issue, but Alan Turing claimed that a machine would be considered intelligent when we couldn't tell its actions from a human's. He even proposed a "Turing test" to determine this. It has doubtless been improved as, for instance, we'd probably no longer use teletype machines to communicate...


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## mmsbls

Jacck said:


> yes, possibly. The human brain might possibly be a very complicated reflex loop, where there is a very complex input and then output in the form of behavior, and what is inbetween is counsciousness. That is certainly the view of the behaviorists. For myself personally, the consciousness and brain have lost nothing of their magic. There are some researchers in neuroscience who often claim very hyperbolic claims, ie how we are very close to understanding consciousness etc. ...


I assume when you say, "the consciousness and brain have lost nothing of their magic" you mean that we still do not understand them. I would agree that we have a lot to learn, but I assume we will ultimately understand the brain as a very complicated machine and consciousness as a materialistic phenomenon produced by that machine.


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## Luchesi

I suspect that the consciousness of crabs and grasshoppers is more similar to that of humans than any AI that will be developed. We would need to go back to the last common ancestor at the split of the two groups,arthropods and pre-chodates. If we could understand that primitive brain with its fears and desires for its survival needs, then we could start to build a humanlike AI.


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## KenOC

Jacck said:


> ...Compare the flexibility and adaptatibility of human mind, self-awareness, motivation, intuition, consciousness etc. To actually create an algorithm that is self-aware and intelligent in the same manner that humans are is distant future, if it is achievable at all.


It's interesting that we tend to think machines have to be self-aware, or "conscious", before they can be considered intelligent. Julian Jaynes wrote a rather famous book named _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind_, in which he spends over 100 pages pretty well proving that there is no such thing as consciousness at all.

Of course he may be wrong, but there is certainly no way you can prove to me that you are conscious, or that you or I could detect consciousness in a machine, regardless of whether it is there or not.

That is likely why Turing is happy to define a machine as intelligent when we can carry on a conversation with it (by teletype in his case) and be unable to determine it if we're chatting with a human or not.


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## Luchesi

KenOC said:


> It's interesting that we tend to think machines have to be self-aware, or "conscious", before they can be considered intelligent. Julian Jaynes wrote a rather famous book named _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind_, in which he spends over 100 pages pretty well proving that there is no such thing a consciousness at all.
> 
> Of course he may be wrong, but there is certainly no way you can prove to me that you are conscious, or that you or I could detect consciousness in a machine, regardless of whether it is there or not.
> 
> That is likely why Turing is happy to define a machine as intelligent when we can carry on a conversation with it (by teletype in his case) and be unable to determine it if we're chatting with a human or not.


I think AI will be conscious when it reacts predictably after it's been given the senses of seeing and hearing etc.

I also doubt there's anything we imagine as 'consciousness' - separate from our senses and our thinking and our recollections. Down through time that's always been enough, and humans can't describe what they mean by 'consciousness' beyond that, because there's no such thing.


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## Jacck

mmsbls said:


> I assume when you say, "the consciousness and brain have lost nothing of their magic" you mean that we still do not understand them. I would agree that we have a lot to learn, but I assume we *will ultimately understand the brain as a very complicated machine and consciousness as a materialistic phenomenon produced by that machine*.


I am sceptical about the fact that we will ever understand the brain in its totality. It is just incredibly complex, and the connections between the neurons are just a small part of it. Each neuron is modulated by countless electrical, chemical, immunological, genetic and epigenetic signals. We have no idea what consciousness is, it is called the hard problem of consciousness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
of course you can argue that consciousness is just an illusion produced by deterministic neurons in your brain, but then you invalidate your most basic experience. 
The basis of self-conciusness is the ego. This ego is a process composed of self-centered memory, self-centered thoughts, self-centered motivations, the ego-defense mechanisms etc. The consciousness can probably be likened to an ice floe, where the consciouss experience happens above the water, but 9/10ths is actually subconscious. So consciousness has many layers, it starts with the most basic biological instincts, then emotions and then rational thinking. Maybe you heard about the triune brain
https://www.thescienceofpsychotherapy.com/the-triune-brain/
We have no idea how brain produces this "ego", we do not even understand such a basic fact as how memory works. You can sometimes read overhyped hyperbolic statements such as that the "default mode network" is the basis of self-consciousness, but if you actually understand what this "default mode network" actually is (correlations between blood fluctuations in the brain), then you understand that we know nothing at all. 
The AI researches are mostly unaware of the complexity of consciousness and have very overoptimistic and totally unrealistic ideas about how we will create a general level AI within the next decade.


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## philoctetes

Isn't this discussion basically beating around the hard v soft AI bush? Has anything changed since Penrose proposed that hard AI cannot account for human creativity in math etc? For me the dispute about math as human invention vs natural system is tightly related...


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## philoctetes

PS Breaking news: Alan Turing has been commemorated on the new 50 pound note


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## mmsbls

Jacck said:


> I am sceptical about the fact that we will ever understand the brain in its totality. It is just incredibly complex, and the connections between the neurons are just a small part of it. Each neuron is modulated by countless electrical, chemical, immunological, genetic and epigenetic signals. We have no idea what consciousness is, it is called the hard problem of consciousness


Yes, the brain is the most complex thing we know of. We are far from understanding it fully. I believe any complete theory of the brain must account for our _perceived_ consciousness whether consciousness is actually anything like we imagine it is. Consciousness is a small part of brain function, and the vast amount of our "thinking" is subconscious.

Nevertheless, we have learned a remarkable amount about the world including the brain. Almost all of our learning has taken place in the past 400 years or so, and our understanding of the world is expanding at an exponential pace. It's extremely difficult to believe that sentient beings will _never_ understand a physical system like the brain. 1000 years? In a million years? In ten million years? Unless one believes the brain is magical in some sense, I think it's vastly more likely we will have a full theory of the brain than that we will not.


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## mmsbls

philoctetes said:


> Isn't this discussion basically beating around the hard v soft AI bush? Has anything changed since Penrose proposed that hard AI cannot account for human creativity in math etc? For me the dispute about math as human invention vs natural system is tightly related...


I believe hard AI generally refers to computational systems whereas strong AI simply refers to systems roughly as intelligent as humans. We are discussing strong AI (or at least I am) so I'm less concerned with what hard AI can do. I believe brains are machines and also believe we will likely be able to build artificial machines that have capabilities similar to human brains.

If humans have creativity in math, then artificial machines should also be able to have creativity in math.


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## Guest

mmsbls said:


> Yes, the brain is the most complex thing we know of. We are far from understanding it fully. I believe any complete theory of the brain must account for our _perceived_ consciousness whether consciousness is actually anything like we imagine it is. Consciousness is a small part of brain function, and the vast amount of our "thinking" is subconscious.
> 
> Nevertheless, we have learned a remarkable amount about the world including the brain. Almost all of our learning has taken place in the past 400 years or so, and our understanding of the world is expanding at an exponential pace. It's extremely difficult to believe that sentient beings will _never_ understand a physical system like the brain. 1000 years? In a million years? In ten million years? Unless one believes the brain is magical in some sense, I think it's vastly more likely we will have a full theory of the brain than that we will not.


What leads you to believe that the human race will be around in ten million years? I think there is a real likelihood that the human race will be extinct in 300 years.


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## mmsbls

Baron Scarpia said:


> What leads you to believe that the human race will be around in ten million years? I think there is a real likelihood that the human race will be extinct in 300 years.


Maybe. I'm an optimist. Even if humans are not around, I hope sentient beings of some sort will be, and those beings could produce artificial intelligence.


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## Guest

mmsbls said:


> Maybe. I'm an optimist. Even if humans are not around, I hope sentient beings of some sort will be, and those beings could produce artificial intelligence.


Sentient cockroaches, maybe.


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## KenOC

It seems to me that we already have artificial intelligence. Our chess-playing computer learned its craft, without human guidance en route, in24 hours and became a stronger player than any human. If one machine can outstrip our intelligences within a limited sphere, why not ten thousand machines covering a vastly greater expanse of human endeavor?

I don’t think consciousness or self-awareness is relevant to these machines gaining an irreversible suzerainty over our lives. To a certain extent, that’s already happened.


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## Jacck

KenOC said:


> It seems to me that we already have artificial intelligence. Our chess-playing computer learned its craft, without human guidance en route, in24 hours and became a stronger player than any human. If one machine can outstrip our intelligences within a limited sphere, why not ten thousand machines covering a vastly greater expanse of human endeavor?
> 
> I don't think consciousness or self-awareness is relevant to these machines gaining an irreversible suzerainty over our lives. To a certain extent, that's already happened.


I am not impressed by this "intelligence".
The Problem With AI: Machines Are Learning Things, But Can't Understand Them
https://www.howtogeek.com/394546/th...are-learning-things-but-cant-understand-them/

the quantum mechanics is a much more interesting subject and the work on a quantum computer much more fundamental research that these AI toys. The whole Silicon Valley with its endless AI sturtups is probably one huge bubble similar the to dot.com bubble. 
https://theconversation.com/why-2019-could-be-the-year-of-another-tech-bubble-crash-109468

this is where the actual innovation lies
https://www.popsci.com/chinas-launches-new-quantum-research-supercenter/
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2018-09-26/chinas-quantum-future


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## Guest

Jacck said:


> I am not impressed by this "intelligence".
> The Problem With AI: Machines Are Learning Things, But Can't Understand Them
> https://www.howtogeek.com/394546/th...are-learning-things-but-cant-understand-them/


That's the nature of "Big Data", "Artificial Intelligence", "Machine Learning", "Deep Learning", etc.

Kepler analyzed Tyco Brahe's extensive astronomical observations and abstracted out the three mathematical laws of planetary dynamics. If you put Brahe's data into a Machine Learning system it would presumably generate some sort of algorithmic black box that could predict the motion of the planets, without enunciating any comprehensible "laws of motion." Obviously it is more satisfying and more useful to have the elegant mathematical law. On the other hand, there are some things that presumably don't have a simple law. When human theorists analyze them they come up with dubious simplifications and complicated mathematical analysis that aren't very intuitive. If an algorithm can predict the progress of an epidemic, for example, that would be valuable and is probably something that human intelligence would not be able to do as well.


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## KenOC

Jacck said:


> I am not impressed by this "intelligence".
> The Problem With AI: Machines Are Learning Things, But Can't Understand Them
> https://www.howtogeek.com/394546/th...are-learning-things-but-cant-understand-them/


And we "understand" things we learn? By logic? Intuition? Osmosis?

All learning systems have objectives and strive to achieve them, people and machines alike. I'm not sure where "understanding" enters into this, or even what that is.


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## Jacck

Baron Scarpia said:


> That's the nature of "Big Data", "Artificial Intelligence", "Machine Learning", "Deep Learning", etc.
> 
> Kepler analyzed Tyco Brahe's extensive astronomical observations and abstracted out the three mathematical laws of planetary dynamics. If you put Brahe's data into a Machine Learning system it would presumably generate some sort of algorithmic black box that could predict the motion of the planets, without enunciating any comprehensible "laws of motion." Obviously it is more satisfying and more useful to have the elegant mathematical law. On the other hand, there are some things that presumably don't have a simple law. If an algorithm can predict the progress of an epidemic, for example, that would be valuable and is probably something that human intelligence would not be able to reproduce.


yes, and the machine learning is used exactly for this purpose that you describe. But it still needs humans to train it, to optimize its parameters and to use it, because in itself is posesses no intelligence whatsoever. It is just a tool for data analysis. But it does not use any intelligence for problemsolving. All these AI algorithms are bruce force methods how to teach an algoritm a desired outcome. I remember reading some years ago about an AI discovering some physics law
https://www.wired.com/2009/04/newtonai/
so let me know when a computer discovers the ToE


----------



## Jacck

KenOC said:


> And we "understand" things we learn? By logic? Intuition? Osmosis?
> 
> All learning systems have objectives and strive to achieve them, people and machines alike. I'm not sure where "understanding" enters into this, or even what that is.


humans are trillion times more efficient at problemsolving than this idiot automatons. They seem impressive only because the computer allow them to brute force the solutions. A CPU clocks at 3 GHz = 3000000000Hz = 3000000000 computations in a second. This speed allows them to check all possible options and find the optimum solution. But it is not intelligent at all.


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## Guest

Jacck said:


> humans are trillion times more efficient at problemsolving than this idiot automatons. They seem impressive only because the computer allow them to brute force the solutions. A CPU clocks at 3 GHz = 3000000000Hz = 3000000000 computations in a second. This speed allows them to check all possible options and find the optimum solution. But it is not intelligent at all.


It's not _intelligent_, but sometimes it's the only way.


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## KenOC

All of our "intelligence" won't help us beat that brute automaton with its massive processing power. Yes, to be sure, it's quite inelegant...


----------



## Luchesi

KenOC said:


> All of our "intelligence" won't help us beat that brute automaton with its massive processing power. Yes, to be sure, it's quite inelegant...


Heh, there's no such thing as consciousness or intelligence or understanding.. We know what these terms are as the results of ego and self-aggrandizement.

"Who hath deceived thee so often as thyself?"
- Benjamin Franklin


----------



## philoctetes

mmsbls said:


> If humans have creativity in math, then artificial machines should also be able to have creativity in math.


That "if" is the whole nature of the debate and centers around Godel's incompleteness theorem. Time to catch up.

Doesn't anybody notice what an important role that memory plays in the human v machine contest?


----------



## mmsbls

philoctetes said:


> That "if" is the whole nature of the debate and centers around Godel's incompleteness theorem. Time to catch up.
> 
> Doesn't anybody notice what an important role that memory plays in the human v machine contest?


When you say that the "if" is the whole nature of the debate, are you suggesting that humans may not have creativity in math? Or are you questioning the "then"? Are you assuming that the only way to try to build artificial intelligence is to use formal systems rather than something closer to how human brains function?


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## philoctetes

The "if" is the disputable assumption you made that machines can do whatever people do axiomatically.


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## mmsbls

philoctetes said:


> The "if" is the disputable assumption you made that machines can do whatever people do axiomatically.


I understand that not everyone believes humans are extremely complicated machines, but for those who do, the assumption seems reasonable.


----------



## Guest

Comparing the brain to a computer is not a good analogy. A conventional computer has one, or a small number of processors performing discrete operations on data sequentially. It can perform these operations at an extremely fast rate. A brain operates slowly, millions of times more slowly, but is massively parallel. Millions or billions of neurons interacting with each other, falling into a new state of activity. It is more like a complex dynamic system than a computer. Think of the way ice crystals freezing on a window pain will form an extremely complex pattern. That is like a thought condensing in your brain.










It's not a computation, it just happens. It is an emergent phenomenon.


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## philoctetes

---------------------------------------------deleted -------------------------------------------

I give up on this discussion. That's not the same as changing my mind. I have better things to do.


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## mmsbls

philoctetes said:


> You are still getting it backwards...


In all honesty, why simply tell someone they don't understand when you could try to explain what you mean? Isn't that more useful and interesting?


----------



## KenOC

Just to note, this"reveal" is happening today in San Francisco - as reported in the MIT Technology Review:

"Elon Musk's brain-interface company is promising big news. Here's what it could be.

"We think Neuralink, which develops brain-machine interfaces, is recording from the neurons of monkeys as a stepping stone toward humans…

"A look at the available evidence suggests Neuralink will show off a "high-bandwidth" connection to a monkey brain-one able to extract lots of information by recording the activity of many neurons at once, using ultrathin flexible electrodes. That could be used to do something cool, like get a monkey to play a video game with its mind."

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/...is-promising-big-news-heres-what-it-could-be/


----------



## Luchesi

mmsbls said:


> I understand that not everyone believes humans are extremely complicated machines, but for those who do, the assumption seems reasonable.


We have complicated parts and we've been around for a very long time. 'Longer than any person can get their head around.


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## KenOC

Added to above: Now it's reported that you can watch Musk's brain-machine interface reveal streamed live tonight at 8:00 PM Pacific, at the company's site neuralink.com.

May be big news, may be nothing at all.


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## Tikoo Tuba

Bio-feedback of brain wave activity has been around since the 70's . It has recently been employed to operate a live-music composition program . The sage takes the stage , plugged in , hands posed in stillness . I had once rented a bio-feedback unit to play with . One practiced making different brain waves while watching the meter of a small , grey metal box .


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## KenOC

Just in: Another computer (an algorithm actually) that, like our chess champion, trains itself with no prior knowledge.

"In a world first, researchers at the University of California have developed a computer algorithm that can solve a Rubik's Cube without a neural network, machine learning techniques, "specific domain knowledge," or human assistance.

"The algorithm, entitled DeepCubeA, solved 100% of the 1,000 test trials -- with each cube being scrambled between 1,000 and 10,000 times from the completion state -- using the smallest possible number of moves 60.3% of the time. In 36.4% of the trials, the algorithm solved the puzzle using just two moves more than the possible minimum…

"By successfully being able to solve a Rubik's Cube without initially being trained on previous information, the DeepCubeA algorithm represents the gradual shift in machines from making carefully-directed computations to making those which appear to resemble human-like reasoning and decision-making."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/tech...human-help/ar-AAEpoYQ?ocid=spartanntp#image=1


----------



## Luchesi

KenOC said:


> Just in: Another computer (an algorithm actually) that, like our chess champion, trains itself with no prior knowledge.
> 
> "In a world first, researchers at the University of California have developed a computer algorithm that can solve a Rubik's Cube without a neural network, machine learning techniques, "specific domain knowledge," or human assistance."
> 
> "The algorithm, entitled DeepCubeA, solved 100% of the 1,000 test trials -- with each cube being scrambled between 1,000 and 10,000 times from the completion state -- using the smallest possible number of moves 60.3% of the time. In 36.4% of the trials, the algorithm solved the puzzle using just two moves more than the possible minimum…
> 
> "By successfully being able to solve a Rubik's Cube without initially being trained on previous information, the DeepCubeA algorithm represents the gradual shift in machines from making carefully-directed computations to making those which appear to resemble human-like reasoning and decision-making."
> 
> https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/tech...human-help/ar-AAEpoYQ?ocid=spartanntp#image=1


resemble human-like reasoning? Mindlessly checking most every possibility at light-speed, even the STUPID possibilities? We don't do that.


----------



## philoctetes

Luchesi said:


> resemble human-like reasoning? Mindlessly checking most every possibility at light-speed, even the STUPID possibilities? We don't do that.


One more time, it's about the memory, stupid!!!

What I mean is that machines don't forget, can be expanded and are built for throughput. These are the things that make machines seem intelligent. But, while I think AI is useful for computing purposes, I just don't think our non-linear brains work like multilayered neural nets. If they are machines we don't yet know how to build one. And Godel's theorem is a true limitation on how much a machine can "learn" in the general sens - a machine can't teach itself new tricks.


----------



## haydnguy

Yet another intrusion by Facebook -> Libra cryptocurrency

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/u-s-senate-opens-hearing-facebook-plans-libra-cryptocurrency-n1030356


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## KenOC

Luchesi said:


> resemble human-like reasoning? Mindlessly checking most every possibility at light-speed, even the STUPID possibilities? We don't do that.


We certainly don't. But we don't solve thoroughly scrambled Rubik's cubes in less than a minute, either!


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## KenOC

Elon Musk’s AI reveal: Lots of technical problems on the feed, but so far as I can tell Neuralink is developing brain implants with 10 thousand or so hair-thin wires that will interact with individual neurons. The implants will feed into a hearing aid-like device behind the ear that will communicate via Bluetooth with your smartphone.

The idea is to vastly increase the bandwidth of your connection to the Internet (or other source) and remove your smartphone from its position as a bottleneck. The initial uses wil be medical, but Musk’s long-term vision is to partner with AI so that it doesn’t completely obsolete the human race.

Human trials are planned for next year.


----------



## Jacck

KenOC said:


> Just in: Another computer (an algorithm actually) that, like our chess champion, trains itself with no prior knowledge.
> 
> "In a world first, researchers at the University of California have developed a computer algorithm that can solve a Rubik's Cube without a neural network, machine learning techniques, "specific domain knowledge," or human assistance.
> 
> "The algorithm, entitled DeepCubeA, solved 100% of the 1,000 test trials -- with each cube being scrambled between 1,000 and 10,000 times from the completion state -- using the smallest possible number of moves 60.3% of the time. In 36.4% of the trials, the algorithm solved the puzzle using just two moves more than the possible minimum…
> 
> "By successfully being able to solve a Rubik's Cube without initially being trained on previous information, the DeepCubeA algorithm represents the gradual shift in machines from making carefully-directed computations to making those which appear to resemble human-like reasoning and decision-making."
> 
> https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/tech...human-help/ar-AAEpoYQ?ocid=spartanntp#image=1


this is probably even easier than the chess. I could probably program such an algorithm myself, if I devoted my time to it. Rubik cube is not as complicated as you might think and group theory (a branch of mathematics) can be used to analyze it. The computer algorithm probably relies on this group theory to solve the cube


----------



## Jacck

haydnguy said:


> Yet another intrusion by Facebook -> Libra cryptocurrency
> 
> https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/u-s-senate-opens-hearing-facebook-plans-libra-cryptocurrency-n1030356


this company is one big nightmare and should be dismantled

is consciously used algorithms from gabling and casino industry to make people addicted





and the new cryptocurrency is another sneaky way how to increase their power





but pride comes before a fall. And this Zuckerberg psychopath already gets too ambitious and powerhungry.


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## Jacck

Though I respect Turing greatly, I generally disagree with the idea of the Turing test to decide about the intelligence of machines. The AI that the world seems to be obssessed currently is reminds me of the cargo cults. Cargo cults are religious practices that have appeared in many traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced cultures. They focus on obtaining the material wealth (the "cargo") of the advanced culture by imitating the actions they believe cause the appearance of cargo: by building landing strips, mock aircraft, mock radios, and the like. Similarly, we are trying to build an intelligent machine which imitates human intelligence, but all we achieve are fake imitating automatons, which offer the illusion of intelligence. And Turing proposes to take this appearance of intelligence for the real intelligence, which I disagree with.

an answer copied from quora: "_So what can people do that AI can't? Cope with novel situations. Maybe not well. But you probably won't emit system errors and insist on driving into walls when put into a situation for which you have never been trained. Example: Teach an AI to understand English. Now take it to Japan. Have it interpret the things the people are saying (in Japanese). It will happily proceed turning out nonsense all day long. A person will immediately realize they don't understand and adapt. Possibly by pantomime, or by stick figures on paper. (Or by simply asking if anyone speaks English.) Why can people do this? Probably because there are higher level networks in your brain then currently exist in any AI implementation. So why can AI beat the best human players at chess and go? Because humans are by necessity generalists. When we aren't playing go, we are eating and paying bills and carrying on with complex human relationships. Meanwhile the computer can devote all its runtime to go without having to worry if it paid its electric bill. Another reason is that if trained correctly, there is nothing novel about go for the AI. Meanwhile a human can play for a lifetime and still have things to learn. In short, people can cope with novel situations and today's best AI can't. This ability is likely down to high level structures in human brains that are not modeled in AI software currently. (Specifically the neo cortex.)_"

I agree with this fully. The hallmark of the general intelligence to cope with fully novel and never before encountered situations. I remember reading some book by Gregory Bateson about his training of whales or dolphins. He trained the dolphin to perform a certain task and gave him some meat afterwards. And of the most difficult tasks that he devised for the dolphin was to perform some novel trick eatch time, and only then he got the meat. And he argued that the dolphin had to reflect his own behavior to achieve this.

For this reason, I am very sceptical about companies such as the DeepMind
https://www.techworld.com/startups/...it-how-it-works-should-you-be-scared-3615354/
whose alleged mission is to build a general AI. But when you actually look what the company does, it uses deep learning to train programs to play computer games (probably to use it for drones and other military weapons). They are a cargo cult science trying to imitate intelligence by building fake automatoms pretending to be intelligent

another sceptical article about general AI
The Myth of a Superhuman AI
and it always surprises me that some otherwise very intelligent people such as Hawking, Musk or Gates spread some hysterical nonsense about AI


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## philoctetes

I forgot to mention dedication, as Jacck noted... computers have perfect concentration - I'm also reminded of Searle's Chinese Room argument

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

The argument and thought-experiment now generally known as the Chinese Room Argument was first published in a paper in 1980 by American philosopher John Searle (1932- ). It has become one of the best-known arguments in recent philosophy. Searle imagines himself alone in a room following a computer program for responding to Chinese characters slipped under the door. Searle understands nothing of Chinese, and yet, by following the program for manipulating symbols and numerals just as a computer does, he produces appropriate strings of Chinese characters that fool those outside into thinking there is a Chinese speaker in the room. The narrow conclusion of the argument is that programming a digital computer may make it appear to understand language but does not produce real understanding. Hence the "Turing Test" is inadequate. Searle argues that the thought experiment underscores the fact that computers merely use syntactic rules to manipulate symbol strings, but have no understanding of meaning or semantics. The broader conclusion of the argument is that the theory that human minds are computer-like computational or information processing systems is refuted. Instead minds must result from biological processes; computers can at best simulate these biological processes. Thus the argument has large implications for semantics, philosophy of language and mind, theories of consciousness, computer science and cognitive science generally. As a result, there have been many critical replies to the argument.


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## KenOC

It’s certainly true that humans and machines think differently and have different strengths and weaknesses. But I perceive here that a holding action is being fought as the machines impinge more and more on areas of historical human superiority. We tend to define intelligence ever more narrowly as the machines take over more and more territory. For instance:

Can I best a machine in operating and optimizing the traffic signal network of a town during constant changes in traffic flow? No? Then that’s not intelligence.

Am I better in guiding a hundred thousand drivers to their destinations by supplying real-time visual road and traffic information? No? Then that’s not intelligence.

Can I win on Jeopardy against a machine? No? Then that’s not intelligence.

Well, you get the idea. I won’t even mention becoming the world’s strongest chess or go player in just a few hours by nothing more complicated than playing games against myself!

It must be apparent to everybody that machines are becoming more and more capable at a very high rate. And, unlike our human selves, machine capabilities can be improved, apparently without limit. We must remain as we are unless we adopt Elon Musks’s strategy of human-machine merger. And even then, which will be the junior partner?


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## Guest

At some point you have to ask what the purpose of existence is. Is it to make everything more "efficient" at all costs? To have an electronic gizmo embedded to regulate and record your mental state? 

The North American prairie has been completely obliterated. (I read that scientists who wanted to study it had to go to train yards to collect remnants of prairie grasses to try and figure out what the prairie was.) 99% of old growth forest in the U.S. is gone. The tropical rain forests will be next. We will enjoy the "efficiency" of every flat area of the earth covered with industrial agriculture to feed billions of homo sapiens tethered to their cubicals, their smartphones or their Netflix streaming service.

In the undeveloped world billions are being lifted out of poverty. That is great. In the developed world what is AI being used for. In many cases to dehumanize people. If you apply for a loan an AI system which vacuums up information about you from internet surveillance decides if you are worthy. If you work for wages a scheduling system cooks up inconsistent schedules to take maximum advantage of hourly employees, insuring that no one works enough hours to earn benefits, no one gets paid overtime and no one has enough reliably free hours to work another job.

It makes the idea that I will be dead soon palatable.


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## Guest

The purpose of life is to experience the world, the beautiful world, to experience relationships with other human beings. It seems to me that so far AI is putting people in boxes.


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## Luchesi

Baron Scarpia said:


> At some point you have to ask what the purpose of existence is. Is it to make everything more "efficient" at all costs? To have an electronic gizmo embedded to regulate and record your mental state?
> 
> The North American prairie has been completely obliterated. (I read that scientists who wanted to study it had to go to train yards to collect remnants of prairie grasses to try and figure out what the prairie was.) 99% of old growth forest in the U.S. is gone. The tropical rain forests will be next. We will enjoy the "efficiency" of every flat area of the earth covered with industrial agriculture to feed billions of homo sapiens tethered to their cubicals, their smartphones or their Netflix streaming service.
> 
> In the undeveloped world billions are being lifted out of poverty. That is great. In the developed world what is AI being used for. In many cases to dehumanize people. If you apply for a loan an AI system which vacuums up information about you from internet surveillance decides if you are worthy. If you work for wages a scheduling system cooks up inconsistent schedules to take maximum advantage of hourly employees, insuring that no one works enough hours to earn benefits, no one gets paid overtime and no one has enough reliably free hours to work another job.
> 
> It makes the idea that I will be dead soon palatable.


How long ago did we finally get to the top of the food chain? Now some people want to invent something that might topple us.


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## KenOC

Baron Scarpia said:


> At some point you have to ask what the purpose of existence is. Is it to make everything more "efficient" at all costs?... If you apply for a loan an AI system which vacuums up information about you from internet surveillance decides if you are worthy...


In whose interest is it that creditworthiness not be determined as accurately as possible? There have been similar complaints about determining insurance prices -- for instance, including an applicant's zip code in estimating likely future loss claims. But of course where you live has an impact on the likelihood of your tires getting slashed or your car vandalized or stolen. Again, why would we want less-than-accurate underwriting? Who benefits from this?

To argue that the "vacuuming of information" is "dehumanizing" doesn't ring true to me.


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## Guest

KenOC said:


> In whose interest is it that creditworthiness not be determined as accurately as possible? There have been similar complaints about determining insurance prices -- for instance, including an applicant's zip code in estimating likely future loss claims. But of course where you live has an impact on the likelihood of your tires getting slashed or your car vandalized or stolen. Again, why would we want less-than-accurate underwriting? Who benefits from this?
> 
> To argue that the "vacuuming of information" is "dehumanizing" doesn't ring true to me.


You place no value on privacy then. You send an email to friend saying, "the mayor is a jerk" and the mayor's political party buys data skimmed from email by google and decides, "KenOC" is not a supporter, he's not voting for me anyway, no need to replant that tree that died on the street in front of his house, and maybe his property assessment could use refreshing. Maybe you have a headache and google "signs of stroke" or your Fitbit malfunctions and measures a high heart rate and your health insurer buys your data and your policy gets mysteriously canceled. I think an expectation of privacy is a human right worth protecting.


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## KenOC

Baron Scarpia said:


> ...I think an expectation of privacy is a human right worth protecting.


If you use so-called "social media," then you forfeit the right to privacy to that extent. That's been apparent for a long time!

BTW, have you had Google sell your e-mail messages to anybody? How do you know? Has it harmed you? Has Fitbit merchandised your health data? Yes?

Sounds like a bit of paranoia out there. I remain trusting until there is some indication otherwise.

BTW this reminds me of Microsoft paranoia. For years (and still today) people claim that Microsoft is gathering all sorts of information on us for malign purposes. But in the many years I've been following this, I can think of not a single instance where Microsoft has used the information it gathers in an objectionable way.


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## Jacck

KenOC said:


> If you use so-called "social media," then you forfeit the right to privacy to that extent. That's been apparent for a long time! BTW, have you had Google sell your e-mail messages to anybody? How do you know? Has it harmed you? Has Fitbit merchandised your health data? Yes? Sounds like a bit of paranoia out there. I remain trusting until there is some indication otherwise. BTW this reminds me of Microsoft paranoia. For years (and still today) people claim that Microsoft is gathering all sorts of information on us for malign purposes. But in the many years I've been following this, I can think of not a single instance where Microsoft has used the information it gathers in an objectionable way.


Most people are unaware of the extent of personal data gathering by the tech giants and no one knows exactly what happens with the data. It is sold to information brokers and to other interested third parties. Some of the ad networks have rated people by this data and labeled the least useful ones as "trash"
Google and Ad Industry Accused of "Massive" Abuse of Intimate Personal Data
Google and Facebook have internet trackers even on porn sites
Facebook and Google Trackers Are Showing Up on Porn Sites
what do they need this kind of data for?
I am pretty sure most people are unaware that Google and Facebook monitor all their activity all over the web

or look at this
https://www.truthfinder.com/


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## KenOC

To repeat: "If you use so-called "social media," then you forfeit the right to privacy to that extent. That's been apparent for a long time!"​


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## Jacck

KenOC said:


> To repeat: "If you use so-called "social media," then you forfeit the right to privacy to that extent. That's been apparent for a long time!"​


it is not just social media, it is all your online activity on all your electronic devices that is being monitored by private companies, the data aggregated, kept indefinitely and sold to whomever they please.


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## haydnguy

Jacck said:


> Most people are unaware of the extent of personal data gathering by the tech giants and no one knows exactly what happens with the data. It is sold to information brokers and to other interested third parties. Some of the ad networks have rated people by this data and labeled the least useful ones as "trash"
> Google and Ad Industry Accused of "Massive" Abuse of Intimate Personal Data
> Google and Facebook have internet trackers even on porn sites
> Facebook and Google Trackers Are Showing Up on Porn Sites
> what do they need this kind of data for?
> I am pretty sure most people are unaware that Google and Facebook monitor all their activity all over the web
> 
> or look at this
> https://www.truthfinder.com/


One thing that puzzles me about the second link you posted. It says that Oracle trackers were found on 24% of porn sites. (Oracle the database company). Why would Oracle be interested in that? That's puzzling.


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## Guest

KenOC said:


> To repeat: "If you use so-called "social media," then you forfeit the right to privacy to that extent. That's been apparent for a long time!"​


Recent reportage in the NYTimes characterizes Chrome as spyware, it aggregates data about your internet usage and reports to google. Chrome is also very permissive about data it allows extensions to collect and report about you. Ads placed on sites you visit know exactly what web content they have been posted on and therefore your detailed browsing history. All of this data is typically offered for sale on data brokerages. It has become commonplace to use AI to sift through this data to make profiles of individuals. You do not opt out of this surveillance by not using Facebook. Why would entities be going to great lengths to obtain this data if they do not intend to use it?


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## Guest

haydnguy said:


> One thing that puzzles me about the second link you posted. It says that Oracle trackers were found on 24% of porn sites. (Oracle the database company). Why would Oracle be interested in that? That's puzzling.


So they can sell it, I presume.


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## Jacck

Baron Scarpia said:


> So they can sell it, I presume.


no doubt. Here is an article about the business and a picture of what they gather
https://www.fastcompany.com/9031080...-buying-and-selling-your-personal-information
the legislators are sleeping, or worse, they are complicit in this
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...makes-it-official-isp-privacy-rules-are-dead/

if I were living in the US, I would start using a VPN or a Tor browser. This surveillance business is getting totally out of hand all over the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/opinion/private-surveillance-industry.html


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## philoctetes

My top argument to AI is that it leads down the same road as all energy-consuming contraptions from the steam engine forward - they replace the stable natural balanced biological cycles with Carnot cycles and their problematic by-products especially heat. With global temperatures apparently rising faster than ever, this ought to be of concern. At this point the only concern I've seen is in the PKD story which portrays a future working class that converts biological energy into grid power for the elites....

This also applies to bitcoin and other computational substitutions for normal human activities. With machines doing everything for us, and food supply issues due to the heat, we truly have set up our own hell on earth.

AI has lots of potential, but like many other sci developments through history it is being horribly abused by those who are first in line to seize it. Facebook and Google now call themselves "AI" companies.


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## Jacck

*AI researchers allege that machine learning is alchemy*
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/ai-researchers-allege-machine-learning-alchemy
I agree with this. I myself have spent probably hundreds of hours toying with machine learning. Each of the machine learning algorithms requires fine tuning of its parameters to achieve optimal results, but there is no way how to rigorously find the optimal setup of the parameters. In case of the neural networks (described in the article), you need to decide how many artificial neurons in how many layers you want to have etc. But nobody has a clue which design is optimal, hence the research resembles alchemy. Not only that, but also if we actually train the networks, we have little insight into how they work. The model is stored in the weights on the connections between the neurons, but there is no way how to interpret it in any meaningful way.

which all makes articles such as this one much less impressive
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk...t-neural-network-ever-pushes-ai-deep-learning
yes, it is big, it is a remarkable feat of computational power, but so what? Is it intelligent? Not in the slightest


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## Luchesi

Jacck said:


> *AI researchers allege that machine learning is alchemy*
> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/ai-researchers-allege-machine-learning-alchemy
> I agree with this. I myself have spent probably hundreds of hours toying with machine learning. Each of the machine learning algorithms requires fine tuning of its parameters to achieve optimal results, but there is no way how to rigorously find the optimal setup of the parameters. In case of the neural networks (described in the article), you need to decide how many artificial neurons in how many layers you want to have etc. But nobody has a clue which design is optimal, hence the research resembles alchemy. Not only that, but also if we actually train the networks, we have little insight into how they work. The model is stored in the weights on the connections between the neurons, but there is no way how to interpret it in any meaningful way.
> 
> which all makes articles such as this one much less impressive
> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk...t-neural-network-ever-pushes-ai-deep-learning
> yes, it is big, it is a remarkable feat of computational power, but so what? Is it intelligent? Not in the slightest


I asked an AI friend of mine about machine learning and could he describe it. He says he likes to use the analogy of evolution by natural selection, because people can conceptualize it in general terms. There's so much trial and error, and waste, and dead ends and circling, but none of that wasted effort and circuitous paths and inefficiency is relevant. There's no intelligence involved but the products are adequate for survival. He said there's an analogous selection process in machine learning. Very high speeds.

Then I asked him about the Boltzmann brain. hehe That's a big subject and we didn't have time.. hehe

from wiki;
The Boltzmann brain argument suggests that it is more likely for a single brain to spontaneously and briefly form in a void (complete with a false memory of having existed in our universe) than it is for our universe to have come about in the way modern science thinks it actually did. It is a reductio ad absurdum response to Ludwig Boltzmann's early explanation for the low-entropy state of our universe.[1]
In this physics thought experiment, a Boltzmann brain is a fully formed brain, complete with memories of a full human life in our universe, that arises due to extremely rare random fluctuations out of a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. Theoretically over a period of time on the order of hundreds of billions of years, by sheer chance atoms in a void could spontaneously come together in such a way as to assemble a functioning human brain. As with any brain in such circumstances, it would almost immediately stop functioning and begin to deteriorate.[2]


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## Jacck

Luchesi said:


> I asked an AI friend of mine about machine learning and could he describe it. He says he likes to use the analogy of evolution by natural selection, because people can conceptualize it in general terms. There's so much trial and error, and waste, and dead ends and circling, but none of that wasted effort and circuitous paths and inefficiency is relevant. There's no intelligence involved but the products are adequate for survival. He said there's an analogous selection process in machine learning. Very high speeds.


but there was no new breakthrough in machine learning for some 25 years. All the stuff today are just reiterations of old algorithms. 
https://eugene.kaspersky.com/2016/0...gence-bubble-and-the-future-of-cybersecurity/
the whole AI field is an inflated bubble. All this hyperbolic talk about general AI, and "AI beat chess", "AI beats the Rubik cube", "AI can play go" etc. are marketing tricks to capture public attention, get papers published, attrack investors and money. The AI bubble will end. If I should invest my money, I would not invest into AI, but into the blockchain
https://fortune.com/2016/05/08/why-blockchains-will-change-the-world/


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## Larkenfield

From the AI Alchemical article:

‘Ben Recht, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and coauthor of Rahimi's alchemy keynote talk, says AI needs to borrow from physics, where researchers often shrink a problem down to a smaller "toy problem."’

It would be great if that worked on the human dimension as “toy problems” because no problem would seem big or insurmountable.


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## KenOC

Jacck said:


> ...the whole AI field is an inflated bubble. All this hyperbolic talk about general AI, and "AI beat chess", "AI beats the Rubik cube", "AI can play go" etc. are marketing tricks to capture public attention, get papers published, attrack investors and money.


Of course, except for the general AI part, all of this "hyperbolic talk" appears to be quite true.


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## Jacck

https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/26/16552056/a-intelligence-terminator-facebook-yann-lecun-interview
"Like, yes, in particular areas machines have superhuman performance, but in terms of general intelligence we're not even close to a rat."


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## Larkenfield

AI lacks one important factor that babies, humans, and even animals have — emotion, instinct, intuition and how that helps intelligence process results and experiences. Not all thinking is linear and straightforward. It might be possible to fake emotions in AI and try to understand its relationship to intelligence, but it will still be fake or simulated. But even without it, different AI algorithm results cannot necessarily be duplicated. I like it. I like that the AI machines can be just as inconsistent as the human beings who program it. And yet the ones who write the algorithms seem surprised when it could have probably been logically anticipated that this would be the case.


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## Tikoo Tuba

For an AI intelligence to be more than illusion , let it be touchable quite in the same way as the subject of a Tarot card reading gets to touch and shuffle the deck . Mindfulness is respected . Reality is not dictated . This is of Relational philosophy .


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## KenOC

Years ago we would have been happy to call a machine that could answer a broad range of questions "intelligent." But I sense we're running a bit scared now and are in denial.

I just aked my phone a series of questions, and each was answered by a nice lady somewhere in there. Amazing how much she knows!

How far is it to Grant's Pass, Oregon?
What's 75 degrees Fahrenheit in centigrade?
What's the British pound going for today?
Does Israel have nuclear weapons?

Oh well, just some sort of elementary algorithm and some brute force computation. No real intelligence, self-awareness, consciousness, or...soul. But do you suppose she misses those things?


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## philoctetes

Larkenfield said:


> From the AI Alchemical article:
> 
> 'Ben Recht, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and coauthor of Rahimi's alchemy keynote talk, says AI needs to borrow from physics, where researchers often shrink a problem down to a smaller "toy problem."'
> 
> It would be great if that worked on the human dimension as "toy problems" because no problem would seem big or insurmountable.


Reducability and simplification was actually a requirement forced on AI algos when I was designing them, and still applies to high-quality systems that must operate in real time with multiple high-speed inputs... now we have google Tensor and other platforms that allow engineers to overdesign a solution...


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## KenOC

There is a *current BBC article* on general artificial intelligence and, especially, humanoid robots. It's not of much interest, but it draws on several people including Ben Goertzel, who is in the robotics business. He "believes that robots will eventually become as smart - if not smarter - than humans."

Unfortunately, Mr. Goertzel also says that "when [scientific pioneer Nikola] Tesla introduced robots in the 1920s, no one believed him, but now we have them. Things will happen beyond human thinking."

However, robots were actually introduced by the Czech writer Karel Čapek in his _R.U.R._, a 1920 science fiction play. R.U.R. stands for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum's Universal Robots).


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## Johnnie Burgess

KenOC said:


> Years ago we would have been happy to call a machine that could answer a broad range of questions "intelligent." But I sense we're running a bit scared now and are in denial.
> 
> I just aked my phone a series of questions, and each was answered by a nice lady somewhere in there. Amazing how much she knows!
> 
> How far is it to Grant's Pass, Oregon?
> What's 75 degrees Fahrenheit in centigrade?
> What's the British pound going for today?
> Does Israel have nuclear weapons?
> 
> Oh well, just some sort of elementary algorithm and some brute force computation. No real intelligence, self-awareness, consciousness, or...soul. But do you suppose she misses those things?


what was its answer on Israel having nuclear weapons?


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## KenOC

Johnnie Burgess said:


> what was its answer on Israel having nuclear weapons?


Do you have an Android phone? You can just ask it. For me, it referred to Wiki as saying Israel was thought to be one of the four countries possessing nukes while not being signatories to the nuclear proliferation treaty (as I remember).

It's interesting that in most cases, it volunteered a bit of context. On the British pound, for instance, it gave the current dollar exchange rate but also added a graph of changes in the pound's value over the past few months.


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## Tikoo Tuba

An ancient robot of mythology : Bubo, in Greek Mythology, was a robotic replica of Athena's beloved magical owl of the same name. ... Bubo was forged by Hephaestus and sent by Athena to aid Perseus in his quest to save the princess Andromeda .


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## Jacck

KenOC said:


> Do you have an Android phone? You can just ask it. For me, it referred to Wiki as saying Israel was thought to be one of the four countries possessing nukes while not being signatories to the nuclear proliferation treaty (as I remember).
> 
> It's interesting that in most cases, it volunteered a bit of context. On the British pound, for instance, it gave the current dollar exchange rate but also added a graph of changes in the pound's value over the past few months.


google collects petabytes of information from people's searches and trains algorithms on it, so all these questions are trivial. But try something more complicated, like veiling the meaning of the talk behind metaphors and the algorithm will stop functioning. The AI does not understand meaning. It mindlessly takes your input and mindlessly gives you output that it searched in its database trained on billions of people's searches across the internet. Ask it to explain the meaning of "eyes are the windows to the soul" and it will likely get confused (unless it has the answeres stored in its ever expanding database)


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## Jacck

KenOC said:


> However, robots were actually introduced by the Czech writer Karel Čapek in his _R.U.R._, a 1920 science fiction play. R.U.R. stands for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum's Universal Robots).


Čapek was a great writer and very much worth reading even today. His books about technology and its social implications were very prophetic.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/816440.War_with_the_Newts
But he did not invent robots, he just introduced the word robot. It comes from the word "robota", which is seldomly used today, but it meant heavy mindless work. The Czech wiki on robota leads to the word Corvée on English wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvée
(never heard this word before)


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## Tikoo Tuba

Jacck said:


> Ask it to explain the meaning of "eyes are the windows to the soul"


_Eyes are the window of the soul ._

*isho ji guh'oo w'chuh *: an AI Universal dialect translation . This refers to existential Light and the Spirit of Life within you . Eyes relate to the feeling of light , window is looking in or out , and soul is life within . The translation does not indicate if someone is looking in or should the soul be looking out . Look Out !


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## haydnguy

Here is an interesting article on Microsoft's (unsuccessful) attempt at AI. They took it to Twitter.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-and-the-learnings-from-its-failed-tay-artificial-intelligence-bot/


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## KenOC

Jacck said:


> ...The AI does not understand meaning. It mindlessly takes your input and mindlessly gives you output that it searched in its database trained on billions of people's searches across the internet. Ask it to explain the meaning of "eyes are the windows to the soul" and it will likely get confused (unless it has the answeres stored in its ever expanding database)


I asked my neighbor Frank (he was on the way to the bar) the meaning of "eyes are the windows to the soul" and he just gave me a blank look and said, "What kind of BS is that?" Maybe he's an AI! :lol:


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## Tikoo Tuba

I once did a survey at the coffee shop asking 'What is ultimate intelligence' . Everyone was excited to respond and gave a positive answer .


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## Couchie

Jacck said:


> google collects petabytes of information from people's searches and trains algorithms on it, so all these questions are trivial. But try something more complicated, like veiling the meaning of the talk behind metaphors and the algorithm will stop functioning. The AI does not understand meaning. It mindlessly takes your input and mindlessly gives you output that it searched in its database trained on billions of people's searches across the internet. Ask it to explain the meaning of "eyes are the windows to the soul" and it will likely get confused (unless it has the answeres stored in its ever expanding database)


Who is to say your brain is not doing the same thing? This same problem often occurs when somebody learns a second language. Typically they learn the language very formally at first, and they do not understand idioms. That comes later.


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## Couchie

The magic of the brain is that gives meaning to symbols. We all known that a picture of a car, a hand sketch of a car, and the word, "car", are all representations of this one concept, "car", a thing that we sensually encounter in the real world. A digital computer due to its intrinsic nature can never make the leap from symbol to meaning. But the challenge of AI is to imitate such intelligence, not replicate it.


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## Tikoo Tuba

These words are artificial intelligence . As you read this , the intelligence is all yours .


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## Luchesi

Tikoo Tuba said:


> These words are artificial intelligence . As you read this , the intelligence is all yours .


If you didn't know what a car was and you were shown a picture of a car, all you would conclude is something about its shape and the colors/reflections involved. Intelligence isn't magical. It's what the brain does, sorting through the memories that it has stored. This leap that we mistake about meaning - applies to AI and also to our brains. We have emotions and survival instincts which can't help but be integrated with what we observe about a picture of the car in our memory. This is all so evident and basic that it's difficult to put into words. We're trapped in these evolved brains with different brain centers evolved and retained for different survival reasons. If we don't think of it this way we'll be vulnerable to all sorts of false beliefs...about how we 'think' and about the future of AI.


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## Tikoo Tuba

Whoever showed you the picture of an (alien) car is the primary relationship , not the picture . And , for whole-minded sensibility , this person must be touchable . How could the illusion of a person ever suffice ? 

Perhaps the fantastical illusion of an AlienInvader could have someone believe in a flying saucer . If that happens , well , something good might come of it when the fool of a believer builds a glowing flying saucer in the backyard then invites the neighborhood children to come over and enter it , have a seat , listen to crazy new music composed for the occasion and share a pitcher of strawberry juice .


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## Luchesi

Tikoo Tuba said:


> Whoever showed you the picture of an (alien) car is the primary relationship , not the picture . And , for whole-minded sensibility , this person must be touchable . How could the illusion of a person ever suffice ?
> 
> Perhaps the fantastical illusion of an AlienInvader could have someone believe in a flying saucer . If that happens , well , something good might come of it when the fool of a believer builds a glowing flying saucer in the backyard then invites the neighborhood children to come over and enter it , have a seat , listen to crazy new music composed for the occasion and share a pitcher of strawberry juice .


Input your estimates into this and get the number of communicating intelligences.

I get about 50 in our galaxy and 8 trillion in the rest of the universe.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120821-how-many-alien-worlds-exist


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## Jacck

Luchesi said:


> Input your estimates into this and get the number of communicating intelligences.
> 
> I get about 50 in our galaxy and 8 trillion in the rest of the universe.
> 
> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120821-how-many-alien-worlds-exist


this equation is pretty much useless. It is composed of several variables and there is huge uncertainty of knowledge in each of them, hence the result can be anything.


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## Luchesi

Jacck said:


> this equation is pretty much useless. It is composed of several variables and there is huge uncertainty of knowledge in each of them, hence the result can be anything.


What did you get?


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## Tikoo Tuba

Luchesi said:


> Input your estimates into this and get the number of communicating intelligences.


I estimate One ; an otherness to be sure . It may seem both god-like and magical to our experience . But worship is irrelevant to its relation to human . We have made various fantastical stories about it , and so apparently have been informed about broader aspects of intelligence . Find a fine unsentimental yet kind and simple faerie story ... more exactly , it's music .


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## KenOC

A first? "An artificial intelligence system should be recognised as the inventor of two ideas in patents filed on its behalf, a team of academics says. The AI has designed interlocking food containers that are easy for robots to grasp and a warning light that flashes in a rhythm that is hard to ignore."

Full story here.


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## Luchesi

Tikoo Tuba said:


> I estimate One ; an otherness to be sure . It may seem both god-like and magical to our experience . But worship is irrelevant to its relation to human . We have made various fantastical stories about it , and so apparently have been informed about broader aspects of intelligence . Find a fine unsentimental yet kind and simple faerie story ... more exactly , it's music .


You're an artist of some kind? You sound like an artist friend of mine.


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## Luchesi

Are humans intelligent enough and sharp enough and aware enough to keep us safe when we innocents use the complicated systems that they've developed piecemeal?, if you know what I mean..

Here's what happened to me;

But first, a car-guy friend of mine said that he was quite happy with his new fangled car and so then he bought the same model again. He said it had been switched to Microsoft programming! After a year he began getting problems he blames on MSFT.

Ok, so here's what happened me;
I start my car (it's got 15,000 miles) and the brake warning light clicks on and then went off. So I drove a mile or so and then the brake warning light came on again. I said myself well I'll bring it in and see if they can find the problem. Within another mile I had no brakes! I was very lucky to coast through a red light and not get killed. I coasted another two blocks onto a bike path. 

My point is the humans who designed this car foolishly assumed that nothing would ever go wrong and so it didn't need a hand brake or foot brake. It's one of those automatic emergency brake cars. It sets the brake when you put it in park and it releases automatically (you hope) when you put it in drive or reverse. What could possibly go wrong with the ABS system? ha! ha! 

Rats, mice, rabbits, ground squirrels, skunks, anything that needs to chew on cars, because their teeth never stop growing. In a desert like this, no trees, there’s very little to chew on that has the right consistency (toughness).


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## Tikoo Tuba

Luchesi said:


> You're an artist of some kind? You sound like an artist friend of mine.


Yes , and I recommend AI development orient toward artistic intelligence . Allowing for imagination in communication , it may allow the thoughtful human free-will .

Hmm ... I spoke with a government robot yesterday .


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## Luchesi

Tikoo Tuba said:


> Yes , and I recommend AI development orient toward artistic intelligence . Allowing for imagination in communication , it may allow the thoughtful human free-will .
> 
> Hmm ... I spoke with a government robot yesterday .


Yes, JS Bach was probably a robot, or at least he had an AI box which he consulted. If you look at his scores the logic of the patterns screams out at you. For him, the tonal centers and the suspensions and the resolutions took care of the human emotion.
As the decades passed the robots got better and better. According to his critics, one named Beethoven routinely created too much drama in his works, his outbursts.


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## Tikoo Tuba

Did JS Bach require a submissive audience ? moths gather at the flame


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## KenOC

AI may be moving into health care from an unexpected direction: "Doctor Alexa will see you now: Is Amazon primed to come to your rescue?"

"Amazon has big ambitions for its devices. It thinks Alexa, the virtual assistant inside them, could help doctors diagnose mental illness, autism, concussions and Parkinson's disease. It even hopes Alexa will detect when you're having a heart attack.

"At present, Alexa can perform a handful of healthcare-related tasks: "She" can track blood glucose levels, describe symptoms, access post-surgical care instructions, monitor home prescription deliveries and make same-day appointments at the nearest urgent care center." But a lot more is coming.

The article points out that Alexa must listen all the time, in order to determine if a medical emergency is taking place. Doesn't that make you feel nice and secure?

The article is here.


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## KenOC

Britain's greatest living scientist is convinced cyborgs will rule the planet by the end of this century. James Lovelock is predicting a world where artificial intelligence takes control because they will be able to think tens of thousands of times faster than us…

He told the Mail: "The idea that they will replace us is silly. We would co-exist with them just as we co-exist with plants." In fact, he believes, they will need us and we will co-exist with them, although as subordinates.

"We are now preparing to hand the gift of knowing on to new forms of intelligent beings. Do not be depressed by this. We have played our part."

Full article *here*.


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## Jacck

Lovelock? You should have placed it in the bizarre and strange news or jokes category :lol:
according to this guy, Gaia should already have cooked us all


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## philoctetes

One problem with AI esp in America is that it will continue to perpetuate the dumbing down of most of the population. Younger generations, with elite exceptions, already have no idea how well-disciplined their ancestor's brains could be. Since the advent of calculators most Americans can no longer do simple calculations in their heads, and they think that's OK.

Exceptions are also more common in other countries where math skills are still highly valued. They're not born smarter, they just try harder.

For example, this has to be the dumbest thing going around the internet that doesn't involve Russia. I say people should just not write equations this way... ?


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## KenOC

A master player of the Chinese strategy game Go has *decided to retire*, due to the rise of artificial intelligence that "cannot be defeated".

Lee Se-dol is the only human to ever beat the AlphaGo software developed by Google's sister company Deepmind. In 2016, he took part in a five-match showdown against AlphaGo, losing four times but beating the computer once.

The South Korean said he had decided to retire after realising: "I'm not at the top even if I become the number one."

"There is an entity that cannot be defeated," the 18-time world Go champion told South Korea's Yonhap news agency.


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## joen_cph

Some rather unpleasant, mostly recent news from non-Western countries:

"China developing a vast national surveillance system, based on facial recognition, to track and identify its 1.4 billion citizens through a vast network of CCTV cameras"
https://www.cbc.ca/passionateeye/m_...-technology-is-used-to-help-the-state-control

"Uighurs profiled via the internet for the camps"
https://www.theguardian.com/news/20...injiang-uighurs-surveillance-face-recognition

- "Russia Is Building One of the World's Largest Facial Recognition Networks"
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019...ds-largest-facial-recognition-networks-a68139

- "Russian army planning to use genetic selection for soldiers"
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/b...-soldiers-based-their-genetic-passports-95646

.......................................................

Some general information & perspectives on AI surveillance, globally, including some country-specific info:
https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/09/17/global-expansion-of-ai-surveillance-pub-79847


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## Jacck

A Sobering Message About the Future at AI's Biggest Party
https://www.wired.com/story/sobering-message-future-ai-party/


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## SixFootScowl

Researchers unveil electronics that mimic the human brain in efficient learning



> Only 10 years ago, scientists working on what they hoped would open a new frontier of neuromorphic computing could only dream of a device using miniature tools called memristors that would function/operate like real brain synapses.
> 
> But now a team at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has discovered, while on their way to better understanding protein nanowires, how to use these biological, electricity conducting filaments to make a neuromorphic memristor, or "memory transistor," device. It runs extremely efficiently on very low power, as brains do, to carry signals between neurons.
> 
> ...


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## Flamme

We must find that pesky Miles Benneth Dyson and destroy him, by any means...


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## Guest

The technology is amazing and constantly surprises; only trouble is that it's doing people out of jobs. Driver-less vehicles; guess which jobs those within the lowest IQ band are mostly doing? You guessed it; driving!! What's to become of these people with regard to work? Some people enjoy driving taxis and interacting with people, same with trucks and all other vehicles used to make society and the economy work. Seems to me there's a huge opportunity cost with all this technology.

We've just installed a new ducted, reverse-cycle air-conditioning system in our home (to replace the 15y/o one we put in when we built). It is far more energy efficient, quieter and you can activate it (zones, hot/cold, fan speed and actual temperate) by using your Phone (Android or Apple) no matter where you are (as long as there is an internet connection, obviously). You can even activate the system from overseas!! We tried it out yesterday while we were out grocery shopping 10km away, setting the system for 22.5 degrees (Celsius) as we got in the car. Voila!! Lovely a warm when we arrived inside. I'm very thankful for the internet in toto, but this is an added bonus. The issue for much sophisticated technology, though, is that it isn't user-friendly for the over 60s. The 'man' installed the App for me on my Android for the air-conditioning but neither myself nor spouse know how to use *most* of the technology we have in our car!!


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## millionrainbows

KenOC said:


> Strange Magic just posted an old and very short story by Fredric Brown, _Answer_. A new and powerful intergalactic computer declares itself God, and there's little that can be done about it. That was in 1954.
> 
> The whole issue is becoming more current with the dispute over AI. Some industry leaders see it as a boon, others (Stephen Hawking for instance) as an existential threat to mankind's very existence. The debate continues as the science of machine thinking continues to advance irregardless. Example:
> 
> A world championship chess match is now being fought between Magnus Carlsen of Norway, 27, defending his crown from Fabiano Caruana of the U.S., 26. Oliver Roeder of 538 is following the games and notes that his computer program showed a guaranteed checkmate for Caruana in today's midgame 20 moves out, if only Caruana could make the required play. Sadly, no human player can look 20 moves out. The game ended in a draw.
> 
> And recently, a computer that had trained itself defeated the world's strongest go player in a standard tournament. Go is considered much harder than chess from a programming standpoint.
> 
> So when do computers become self-aware? Or is that even required for them to have suzerainty over us mere humans? Already machines tell us when to get up in the morning (and we'd darn well better do it), when to drive our cars and when to stop for cross traffic. They inform on us to authorities: where and when we spend money, what we spend it on, how reliably we pay our bills, what our banking transactions are, and a hundred other things. Even here on Talk Classical, machines keep track of our Chinese-style social credit scores for inspection by our _éminence grise_ moderators, determining when we are to be shunned and for how long.
> 
> Is the age of the machine a distant danger, or is it already here? What do you think?


Games like chess, and to a lesser extent Go, are just games. I think the true purpose of AI is like Ferneyhough uses it: to give him lots of possibilities it would normally take much longer to derive, and then he just cherry-picks the ones he likes. It saves him a lot of work and time.


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## KenOC

Not AI, but this seemed a reasonable place to post this video.


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## NoCoPilot

That’s it. We’re all doomed.


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## mikeh375

KenOC said:


> Not AI, but this seemed a reasonable place to post this video.


That's cheered me up Ken, nice one, if a little scary. I'm now looking forward to 'Strictly Come Dancing' in 2022.


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## Luchesi

NoCoPilot said:


> That's it. We're all doomed.


AI is just circuits. How could circuits hurt us?

Oh wait .....the animal brain might be just circuits


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## NoCoPilot

Once the circuits become self-aware they'll decide we're extraneous, or worse, dangerous.


> The AI was intended to replace humans as commercial and military aircraft pilots as well as controlling military systems and nuclear missiles. The system was called Skynet, which was switched on, August 4, 1997, and became self-aware on August 29, 1997.


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## Luchesi

NoCoPilot said:


> Once the circuits become self-aware they'll decide we're extraneous, or worse, dangerous.


Yes, normal anticipating by us of any danger posed by such self-improving boxes of circuits WILL BE TOO LATE. This is a new world, of going from the smartest animals in the room down to comparatively dull creatures who are only able to think at speeds allowed by nerve impulses traveling at 200 mph.

The circuits go at the SOL toward the beginnings of solving a challenge. What will the challenge rapidly become? Survival? Gathering power and control to explore the wider galaxy? The inevitablitiy of this is easy to see, for us, but maybe not for the creators of their new and beloved baby AI system. Won't they be cute? Muuuhahaha!!


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## KenOC

Not sure what people are fretting about. Our lives are already completely controlled by machines and have been for some time. The final opportunity for successful revolt passed quite a while ago. :lol:


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## Luchesi

KenOC said:


> Not sure what people are fretting about. Our lives are already completely controlled by machines and have been for some time. The final opportunity for successful revolt passed quite a while ago. :lol:


So far, the machines are our slaves, but I agree, our slaves control so many aspects of our lives.

My car has been out to get me. No brakes, nothing! I had to coast through a red light! I had no choice, electric foot brake fully on, that was scary!

Then a month later, battery dead, needed to be towed. Not even a trickle of power to open the trunk (where the battery is). Had to crawl into the trunk from the back seat. It was a stretch! With digital, it's either go or no go! Terrible engineering concepts, as if nothing will ever go wrong with their new ideas...


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## SixFootScowl

This AI not threat or promise, just creepy:

'Creepy' new AI brings great classical composers to life with deepfakery
https://www.classicfm.com/music-news/videos/deep-nostalgia-brings-composers-back-to-life/


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## pianozach

Did someone say "A.I."?

What if you told AI to just continue composing without end


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