Having children in the context of machines would be manufacturing new machines rather than carrying a machine to term via pregnancy, and machines can already manufacture new machines, so that one's out.
Feeling empathy, writing books, imagining, admiring art, feeling regret or any other human emotion, and various patterns of thought are things we don't know how to make machines do yet. The fact that humans can do those things shows that it's possible for things to do those things, therefore it's possible in principle for us to design things that can do those things. We just need to figure out how.
And people used to be getting no nearer to heavier-than-air flight until, suddenly, they were nearer. I can show you upwards of seven billion examples demonstrating that intelligence is possible, it's just a matter of time until we figure out how to decouple it from life.
There isn't anything that humans can do that machines are naturally incapable of doing, just things that we haven't yet figured out how to make machines do. That you talk about people moving to other jobs shows that you haven't fully considered the ramifications of us figuring out how to make machines do everything. For there to be other jobs there needs to be something humans are better than machines at, and eventually if not necessarily by 2045 there will be no such thing. The greatest human in history is the lower bound of how good at something it may be physically possible to be, and since physical possibility is what matters with technology, future humanity will at a minimum be mass-producing Einsteins, Beethovens, and Leonardo da Vincis. This is going to be less like assembly line workers vs. assembly line robots and more like Homo erectus vs. Homo sapiens.
The stuff discussed in the article isn't even "information rammed down your throat when you don't want it". I'd hesitate to call it "information". Wow, that building may contain something somewhere that has been shown to cause cancer at unspecified doses given conditions that aren't present on the sticker. Thanks for the warning, what the fuck do I do with it?
If the sticker actually said what the cancer-causing chemical was, how it's used in the business, problematic dose level, if being near it is an issue or if I need to drink it from the bottle before I have to worry, stuff like that, it would be somewhat useful. The problem is that the sticker doesn't distinguish between "there's a measurable chance that you'll get cancer if you go into the wrong room here" and "you'll get cancer if you bathe in toilet cleaner, and they've got toilet cleaner here". Calling it "information" is being too generous.
Terrorist alert levels have a similar issue of failing to convey anything but a general badness sense. They're updated nationally, so I have no idea if the problem is supposed to be where I am or on the other coast somewhere, and furthermore I can't tell if we're expected another plane thing or a marathon thing or if those cyberterrorists we've been hearing so much about have finally managed to hack the power grid. It's the lack of real information that makes the warning useless, not that what information there is was rammed down my throat.
"The command structure declared it to be classified... it's classified. Transferring it to an unauthorized location is a violation of orders under military law, whether or not it's classified."
Translation: his superiors said they didn't want that stuff to get out, and, what's more, the place that the files were sent was somewhere they didn't want those files going. This stands in sharp contrast to standard whistleblowers, who I guess ask permission first or something?
"Using unauthorized software on military computers is another. Getting around mandated security mechanisms is another."
Also, apparently he was looking somewhere he wasn't supposed to look with a program he wasn't supposed to use. Surely no whistleblower in the history of whistles has done such a heinous thing!
"the military has a whistle-blower provision, but a pretty narrow one requiring that the military member report to Congress or to the Inspector General. Nothing about the press, public, or Wikileaks."
And now apparently revealing information to the press or public means that a soldier isn't a whistleblower. I now know what it feels like for one's mind to be boggled. I can't even be sarcastic about this.
The charges on Wikipedia don't impress me much either, since they all appear to be in the same vein of "sending something somewhere that the military didn't want it sent". Upholding those rules here would be the death of whistleblower protections in the military, though by the sound of it it's more like refusing to uphold those rules would reanimate whistleblower protections in the military.
What I've learned from this is that if I ever feel like being corrupt, I need to become a high-ranking military officer, because they've got a deal that the average corporate head would rape a porcupine for.
And now for a classic literature reference and a conclusion.
"Whether he _thought_ something should be classified and not divulged isn't his business."
Business?! Mankind is his business! The common welfare is his business!
"The rules in the military are different than for the public."
I most certainly can condone members of the military releasing intentionally information of this kind. What I can't condone is members of one of America's most important government institutions being unable to let Americans know when that institution is misbehaving. Nothing will lead to corruption faster than that kind of setup.
"Yes, I'm sure they've solved some of these issues already, but can they solve all of them?"
Yes. Unless you navigate by communing with the spirits of your ancestors, there's no reason a computer should be incapable of doing the same things you do.
"Not so much, if they want to be safe."
Agreed. The notion of bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic has always seemed to me like less serious prediction and more overenthusiastic futurism.
"Can the car accurately detect where the road is based on where the ditch is?"
I don't see why not. All that takes is knowing where the ditch is.
"I am not convinced that the car could accurately detect the relatively small "One Way" sign among all the billboards and business signs."
It's programmed to scan its environment for navigation signs. It likely won't do anything special with billboards. If they're at all smart about the program, business signs won't distract it from useful signs any more than foliage distracts you.
"There's a sign saying not to use it, but could the car recognize that sign for what it is?"
This could be an issue for the same reason the One Way sign isn't. If it's just a normal, unofficial sign without a physical obstruction, the only way I can see this being avoided is if the cars are made to identify and avoid driveways during transit, which would either definitely happen or probably not happen depending on how reliant the car will be on GPS. This is an uncommon enough problem that I can see it not being thought of during design or coming out during testing for GPS-dependent cars.
"And, while any idiot could read the handmade "No Parking: Police Order" signs made for the local parade, would the car be able to understand that if it wasn't a type of sign it was used to reading?"
No, but whoever's in the car wouldn't have any trouble. It'd be mildly inconvenient to tell the car to park elsewhere, but nothing more.
"Could it understand "No Parking During School Hours"?"
Yes.
"Could it understand that "Golden Retriever Parking Only" is a joke that it can ignore?"
It won't laugh, but I doubt that it'll be programmed to heed that sign.
"For that matter, could it understand a policeman directing traffic, or a parking attendant at a stadium?"
While this would take a bit more code than reading street signs, tracking arm movements isn't an arcane art unknown to machines.
"I am deeply worried that every single driverless car, given a particular stretch of road that confuses them in particular conditions, will make the same mistake and run off the road like a bunch of lemmings. Or will all lose the position of the road lines in the snow, default to the GPS which says the road should be 12 feet to the left, and start driving in the wrong lane right before they crest a hill."
That first one is what testing is for. Even if a glitch is missed during testing, it'll only happen once before it's fixed, which is more than can be said for human drivers. As for the second one: as long as you're able to visually navigate a snow-covered road there's nothing keeping a computer from doing the same.
No, we're not going to need to repaint signs. They're already designed to be pretty distinctive. Funeral processions and the blind are also safe; not running over people is something that car computers are really good at. Fog should be simple, since it doesn't block radar. As for the rest? The hard part was getting computers to drive at all. Having them drive differently in certain conditions will be relatively trivial.
The great thing about computers is that you only need to teach them how to do something once. If driving on ice turns out to be a problem at first, Google will learn of that, their programmers will figure out how to translate an instruction booklet on driving in ice into code, and driving on ice will never be a problem for that company again. If the cars can't recognize construction zones at first, Google's still just an algorithm away from every car being able to identify the signs marking construction zones. Problems will only be problems until they're noticed, and given the lawsuits and publicity shitstorm to be had if every car a company makes doesn't, for example, know to avoid running over blind people, manufacturers are going to make really damn sure that their cars are exposed to and programmed for every driving condition they can think of before releasing their designs into the market. By the time this technology becomes cheap enough for normal people to afford, you're probably going to have people reacting to claims that you prefer driving manually in a manner similar to how people now would react to you saying you feel safer if you use the seatbelt as a blindfold.
Hulu isn't dying because it has one-ninth the subscribers of Netflix. That's a symptom. Hulu is dying because its competition has a paid option worth nine times as much as Hulu's. When you're asked to pay for the privilege of watching more ad-supported content, you feel like you're being ripped off.
If Stardock wanted to get users to install DRM up their asses, they would probably be putting DRM in their games. Closest they've come to doing that is letting people buy their stuff on Steam.
"A derivative work, by definition, would be less creative, as it uses the characters and settings created by someone else. A portion of the world is done for them."
That depends on the original work and the fanfiction in question. There are forms of creativity beyond creating something out of whole cloth. For example, the creativity required to make the worlds of Fallout and My Little Pony mesh nicely together is substantial.
I'm confused about how dilution of a trademark could hurt an open source group. Under what scenarios could hardware bearing a logo similar to one associated with open source software be problematic?
Re: Re:
Having children in the context of machines would be manufacturing new machines rather than carrying a machine to term via pregnancy, and machines can already manufacture new machines, so that one's out.
Feeling empathy, writing books, imagining, admiring art, feeling regret or any other human emotion, and various patterns of thought are things we don't know how to make machines do yet. The fact that humans can do those things shows that it's possible for things to do those things, therefore it's possible in principle for us to design things that can do those things. We just need to figure out how.
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Here.
Re: Re: Re: Re:
If you like, sure. Is that relevant to the point that a current lack of progress does not imply an eternal lack of progress?
Re: Re:
And people used to be getting no nearer to heavier-than-air flight until, suddenly, they were nearer. I can show you upwards of seven billion examples demonstrating that intelligence is possible, it's just a matter of time until we figure out how to decouple it from life.
(untitled comment)
There isn't anything that humans can do that machines are naturally incapable of doing, just things that we haven't yet figured out how to make machines do. That you talk about people moving to other jobs shows that you haven't fully considered the ramifications of us figuring out how to make machines do everything. For there to be other jobs there needs to be something humans are better than machines at, and eventually if not necessarily by 2045 there will be no such thing. The greatest human in history is the lower bound of how good at something it may be physically possible to be, and since physical possibility is what matters with technology, future humanity will at a minimum be mass-producing Einsteins, Beethovens, and Leonardo da Vincis. This is going to be less like assembly line workers vs. assembly line robots and more like Homo erectus vs. Homo sapiens.
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Common sense isn't.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Think in terms of info, then
The stuff discussed in the article isn't even "information rammed down your throat when you don't want it". I'd hesitate to call it "information". Wow, that building may contain something somewhere that has been shown to cause cancer at unspecified doses given conditions that aren't present on the sticker. Thanks for the warning, what the fuck do I do with it?
If the sticker actually said what the cancer-causing chemical was, how it's used in the business, problematic dose level, if being near it is an issue or if I need to drink it from the bottle before I have to worry, stuff like that, it would be somewhat useful. The problem is that the sticker doesn't distinguish between "there's a measurable chance that you'll get cancer if you go into the wrong room here" and "you'll get cancer if you bathe in toilet cleaner, and they've got toilet cleaner here". Calling it "information" is being too generous.
Terrorist alert levels have a similar issue of failing to convey anything but a general badness sense. They're updated nationally, so I have no idea if the problem is supposed to be where I am or on the other coast somewhere, and furthermore I can't tell if we're expected another plane thing or a marathon thing or if those cyberterrorists we've been hearing so much about have finally managed to hack the power grid. It's the lack of real information that makes the warning useless, not that what information there is was rammed down my throat.
Re: Re: Re:
I kind of want to see that warning used as a nut brand name/slogan now.
Re:
It often takes thousands or millions of years, though. While I have every intention of living that long, I'd still rather not wait that long.
Re: Re: Oh, yeah, except it's not.
"The command structure declared it to be classified... it's classified. Transferring it to an unauthorized location is a violation of orders under military law, whether or not it's classified."
Translation: his superiors said they didn't want that stuff to get out, and, what's more, the place that the files were sent was somewhere they didn't want those files going. This stands in sharp contrast to standard whistleblowers, who I guess ask permission first or something?
"Using unauthorized software on military computers is another. Getting around mandated security mechanisms is another."
Also, apparently he was looking somewhere he wasn't supposed to look with a program he wasn't supposed to use. Surely no whistleblower in the history of whistles has done such a heinous thing!
"the military has a whistle-blower provision, but a pretty narrow one requiring that the military member report to Congress or to the Inspector General. Nothing about the press, public, or Wikileaks."
And now apparently revealing information to the press or public means that a soldier isn't a whistleblower. I now know what it feels like for one's mind to be boggled. I can't even be sarcastic about this.
The charges on Wikipedia don't impress me much either, since they all appear to be in the same vein of "sending something somewhere that the military didn't want it sent". Upholding those rules here would be the death of whistleblower protections in the military, though by the sound of it it's more like refusing to uphold those rules would reanimate whistleblower protections in the military.
What I've learned from this is that if I ever feel like being corrupt, I need to become a high-ranking military officer, because they've got a deal that the average corporate head would rape a porcupine for.
And now for a classic literature reference and a conclusion.
"Whether he _thought_ something should be classified and not divulged isn't his business."
Business?! Mankind is his business! The common welfare is his business!
"The rules in the military are different than for the public."
They sure as hell are. That is not a good thing.
Re: close but no banana
I most certainly can condone members of the military releasing intentionally information of this kind. What I can't condone is members of one of America's most important government institutions being unable to let Americans know when that institution is misbehaving. Nothing will lead to corruption faster than that kind of setup.
Re: Re: Re:
"Yes, I'm sure they've solved some of these issues already, but can they solve all of them?"
Yes. Unless you navigate by communing with the spirits of your ancestors, there's no reason a computer should be incapable of doing the same things you do.
"Not so much, if they want to be safe."
Agreed. The notion of bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic has always seemed to me like less serious prediction and more overenthusiastic futurism.
"Can the car accurately detect where the road is based on where the ditch is?"
I don't see why not. All that takes is knowing where the ditch is.
"I am not convinced that the car could accurately detect the relatively small "One Way" sign among all the billboards and business signs."
It's programmed to scan its environment for navigation signs. It likely won't do anything special with billboards. If they're at all smart about the program, business signs won't distract it from useful signs any more than foliage distracts you.
"There's a sign saying not to use it, but could the car recognize that sign for what it is?"
This could be an issue for the same reason the One Way sign isn't. If it's just a normal, unofficial sign without a physical obstruction, the only way I can see this being avoided is if the cars are made to identify and avoid driveways during transit, which would either definitely happen or probably not happen depending on how reliant the car will be on GPS. This is an uncommon enough problem that I can see it not being thought of during design or coming out during testing for GPS-dependent cars.
"And, while any idiot could read the handmade "No Parking: Police Order" signs made for the local parade, would the car be able to understand that if it wasn't a type of sign it was used to reading?"
No, but whoever's in the car wouldn't have any trouble. It'd be mildly inconvenient to tell the car to park elsewhere, but nothing more.
"Could it understand "No Parking During School Hours"?"
Yes.
"Could it understand that "Golden Retriever Parking Only" is a joke that it can ignore?"
It won't laugh, but I doubt that it'll be programmed to heed that sign.
"For that matter, could it understand a policeman directing traffic, or a parking attendant at a stadium?"
While this would take a bit more code than reading street signs, tracking arm movements isn't an arcane art unknown to machines.
"I am deeply worried that every single driverless car, given a particular stretch of road that confuses them in particular conditions, will make the same mistake and run off the road like a bunch of lemmings. Or will all lose the position of the road lines in the snow, default to the GPS which says the road should be 12 feet to the left, and start driving in the wrong lane right before they crest a hill."
That first one is what testing is for. Even if a glitch is missed during testing, it'll only happen once before it's fixed, which is more than can be said for human drivers. As for the second one: as long as you're able to visually navigate a snow-covered road there's nothing keeping a computer from doing the same.
Re:
No, we're not going to need to repaint signs. They're already designed to be pretty distinctive. Funeral processions and the blind are also safe; not running over people is something that car computers are really good at. Fog should be simple, since it doesn't block radar. As for the rest? The hard part was getting computers to drive at all. Having them drive differently in certain conditions will be relatively trivial.
The great thing about computers is that you only need to teach them how to do something once. If driving on ice turns out to be a problem at first, Google will learn of that, their programmers will figure out how to translate an instruction booklet on driving in ice into code, and driving on ice will never be a problem for that company again. If the cars can't recognize construction zones at first, Google's still just an algorithm away from every car being able to identify the signs marking construction zones. Problems will only be problems until they're noticed, and given the lawsuits and publicity shitstorm to be had if every car a company makes doesn't, for example, know to avoid running over blind people, manufacturers are going to make really damn sure that their cars are exposed to and programmed for every driving condition they can think of before releasing their designs into the market. By the time this technology becomes cheap enough for normal people to afford, you're probably going to have people reacting to claims that you prefer driving manually in a manner similar to how people now would react to you saying you feel safer if you use the seatbelt as a blindfold.
(untitled comment)
Hulu isn't dying because it has one-ninth the subscribers of Netflix. That's a symptom. Hulu is dying because its competition has a paid option worth nine times as much as Hulu's. When you're asked to pay for the privilege of watching more ad-supported content, you feel like you're being ripped off.
(untitled comment)
I'm impressed. They figured out how to get paid for astroturfing.
Re:
How's it easier to research in a format that doesn't even let you search for keywords?
Re: Stardock the new weiner kid on the block
If Stardock wanted to get users to install DRM up their asses, they would probably be putting DRM in their games. Closest they've come to doing that is letting people buy their stuff on Steam.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Help me out here...
"$13 is a reasonable price for ebooks as it stands."
That's five more than your average paperback, so no, it's not.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"A derivative work, by definition, would be less creative, as it uses the characters and settings created by someone else. A portion of the world is done for them."
That depends on the original work and the fanfiction in question. There are forms of creativity beyond creating something out of whole cloth. For example, the creativity required to make the worlds of Fallout and My Little Pony mesh nicely together is substantial.
(untitled comment)
I'm confused about how dilution of a trademark could hurt an open source group. Under what scenarios could hardware bearing a logo similar to one associated with open source software be problematic?