Stop hitting that girl with your car!!!

[zachariah]

Subject line thanks to my girlfriend. I'm very curious as to what she would have said had I actually hit the girl. I suppose we'll find that out another day.

So I caught the trashcan on fire at work the other night. Oops? I'm told that's what I get for playing with matches. Personally, I just think that's what I get for throwing them away without dousing them yet. To be fair, I'd lit two matchbooks and blew them out before throwing them in a wastebasket full of....paper. D'oh. Plus side: I finally got to use the extinguisher! Bad side: dry chemicals swoosh up and choke everyone nearby. Hrm.

I think it's about time we discover another sentient, intelligent species. Something on par with humans. I think one of the troubles we have with intelligence is our only experience is with other humans. Look at Star Wars and Star Trek, the two most widely recognized multi-species fictions of this age. Nearly every intelligent species they portray are humanoid in appearance, thought and action. If we found a new type of clam or something in the ocean, one which communicates with chemical excretions over the course of months, we'd never recognize it as intelligent whether it was or not. It's too alien. We'll never recognize any computer system as intelligent, because it's too simple, in the sense that we'll have built it, and can explain the workings of its "thoughts". Our idea of what is "alive", "self-aware", and "intelligent" are so limited, I really do belive we're as likely to destroy (accidentally or otherwise) any such species we find (or are found by) as we are to recognize and communicate with one.

Comments

[lonelyfedora.livejournal.com]

A single desktop processor is projected to have the processing power of a human brain by 2040, and the combined paralleled power of every human being on the planet by 2060.

K

[echthroi.livejournal.com]

Google led me here (http://www.thetech.org/robotics/universal/page12.html), so I won't ask for a link...this time. XP That's a really cool thought, though, that I'll see that power in my lifetime. It's weird, though, because I sure don't feel like I perform a hundred million calculations every second. Sometimes it takes two or even three minutes to finish a thought. XD I'm assuming power is not equivalent to adaptive reasoning, but I'll also assume by 2060 we'll have made some progress with the software as well, neh? So would you ever consider a 'bot to be your equal regarding intrinsic moral value?

[lonelyfedora.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I certainly would, depending on the bot. My favorite book is Positronic Man... Robots with equivalent sentience are most assuredly my moral equal.

As for the human brain it is EXTREMELY SLOW. Processors run on nano-second calculations, human brains are millisecond due to the nature of the chemical reactions in them... however, human brains are three dimensional and massively parallelized, which is why we rock. PC processors are two dimensional and until recently mostly linear.

We should have self-writing programs in the next ten to twenty years fairly easiy, and that's all we essentially are-- self writing programs.

So given some work in artificial intelligence, then yeah, we can have stuff equivalent to us.. in tme.

[echthroi.livejournal.com]

Do you agree with Kurzweil's take on the singularity, how it will be utilized, and when it will occur, then?

[lonelyfedora.livejournal.com]

My friend does! I think it's hogwash. I think self-written programs only means it works in blocks, similar to the way Web Publishing programs currently work.

I think there's too much social stigma about technology. I also think the future of humanity isn't cybernetic but biological-- ever read Star Wars New Jedi Order ;)

Manipulation of chemicals, virii, bacteria, fungi to create. Nanomachines are great, and all, but I think there's a reason life evolved the way it did-- because it was, given the structures available, the most efficient way it could land..

And I think that the US needs to focus on Biochemical as well as cybernetic research, but people only see Medicine as.. Medicine. They don't recognize we could engineer biologicals to create buildings for us, or provide our fuel, or, or, or...

There are things to be said for the exobiological, but... I think it's only a piece of the puzzle

[echthroi.livejournal.com]

The coral fighters, yeah? I haven't heard/read anything about gravity control IRL, so color me skeptical. I like nanoids and cybernetics because it's not really that drastic a change from what we have today. I see it as a finer, more thorough extension of existing robotics/electronics. Not that there aren't problems to solve, or that fields of research need to be narrow. I'm happy for progress in any direction, really.

[lonelyfedora.livejournal.com]

No no, not the gravity control, that's just silly ;) (For now!)

I just mean, using organics as infrastructure instead of purely cybernetics.

[echthroi.livejournal.com]

You'll have to refresh my memory; I don't recall exactly how the interface worked. Your point about social stigma of technology applies to biotech as well, though. Look at the hullabaloo surrounded cloning, or stem cell research. One doesn't get much higher on the "This is a so very abstract moral concern." scale. People don't much like the "icky", much more than they dislike what is perceived as the colder science of electronics. Yes no maybe?

[lonelyfedora.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, there's huge social stigma... Even more, I'd say, than with cybernetics..

I think hacking biologicals has more potential, long term, than hacking the computer..

[echthroi.livejournal.com]

I remember a magazine article about future organic computers. At that point maybe we can all hack together in peace! ;)

[(Anonymous)]

Kurzweil doesn't predict only nanotechnology as the "wave of the future"--he thinks that the Singularity is going to come about as a combination of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence.

He may be overly optimistic about the timeframe. I think he assumes that the scale is perfectly exponential, but I could see overhead costs entering into it as well. That is, there is always going to be some overhead for new developments, and in the past the rate of paradigm shift has been so slow that the overhead did not appreciably affect the exponential shape of the curve, but as time goes on, the overhead will still be there and will take a much larger "bite" out of each paradigm shift and thus serve to somewhat depress the curve.

The reason life evolved the way it did was, as you say, given the structures available it was the most efficient way that it could. We biologicals are marvels of engineering based on protein chemistry. Kurzweil says, though, and I think I agree... That protein chemistry itself is rather limiting. And all biology, on this planet at least, is based on protein chemistry; a specific set of I think 20 amino acids that are combined in myriad ways to create every biological thing on this planet from viruses to trees to humans.

Because evolution is a branching process, it pretty much always goes forward and never backward. Life evolved to use this sort of chemistry, and it's never going to go back to the very basics and say, "well we could use carbon nanotubes instead of keratin, and that would make our skin five million times stronger!"

However, Kurzweil believes that evolution did in a way lead toward that, because it evolved intelligent animals that are able to discover, innovate, and eventually change their own fundamental structure. As humans, we can build artificial organs or limbs out of diamondoid, carbon nanotubes, and other such nanoengineered "supermaterials."

BTW, another thing Kurzweil points out is that we could use genetic engineering to transform existing biological systems like bacteria into nanomolecular assemblers. So you don't disagree with him as much as you may have thought. :-x

[echthroi.livejournal.com]

That last bit about the bacteria reminded me of Prey by Michael Crichton. If he'd avoided the urge to have superhuman "bad guys" it might have been a decent book. XD

If evolution is leading towards humans changing our fundamental structure, we're going to need to make some drastic changes with either the world population or its grossly lopsided economy.

[lonelyfedora.livejournal.com]

I will link my friend to this post, so he can comment.

[echthroi.livejournal.com]

Please do; I like reading. :)

[(Anonymous)]

Essentially, Keith already nailed it--the human brain is very slow, but massively parallel. Also, the human brain is designed to solve very specific types of problems, and what we usually think of as calculation (arithmetic) is not one of them. The human brain is basically an extremely complex pattern-matching engine, and it's good at what AI researchers call classification, prediction, and to a lesser extent, regression.

I'm a materialist. Not in terms of being materialistic, but in terms of... I don't think that there's anything supernatural about how the brain works. I consider the brain to be a "meat machine," and think that the human mind, consciousness, the "soul" if you will, is basically just a side effect of the electrochemical processes that go on in the brain. HOW those electrochemical processes combine to create what we call consciousness, I don't know, and I don't dare guess--that's one of the remaining amazing mysteries of life.

However, this also means that... Because I see no intrinsic separation between the computational functionality of the brain and the side-effect of consciousness, I believe as soon as we create a fully functional simulation of a brain in a computer system, link it to the outside world with sensors, and allow it to start gaining knowledge and insight, it will very quickly be as real and as conscious as you or I. I would consider it to be my intrinsic equal, and I'd consider destroying that computer system to be tantamount to murder.

[echthroi.livejournal.com]

That's what I'm leaning towards at the moment, as well (materialism). I think as long as we keep banging away at the sciences, we'll eventually figure out the hows and whats of our body and mind. I also think that - depending on what we find - it may be virtually impossible to permanently kill a cybernetic life. Assuming memories can be stored in offline archives and the computer's brain hasn't been crafted with a randomized nueral structure, the system could arguably be rebuilt and the life reinstated at the latest backup.

(sorry for the length between replies, I had to go to work earlier.)