Kudos to Oliver

[Roedy Green]

I would just like to give a public thank you to Oliver. He has time
and time again done a extraordinary amount of background work to help
someone with a problem. His answers are detailed, well written and
usually very entertaining to boot.

The world needs more people need more like you Oliver.

I think he is motivated mainly by curiosity. To him people are doing
him a favour by asking questions. It gives him interesting problems to
chew on.

 

[hilz]

I would just like to give a public thank you to Oliver. He has time
and time again done a extraordinary amount of background work to help
someone with a problem. His answers are detailed, well written and
usually very entertaining to boot.

The world needs more people need more like you Oliver.

I think he is motivated mainly by curiosity. To him people are doing
him a favour by asking questions. It gives him interesting problems to
chew on.

Being mostly an observer of this group, I agree.
As much as I like to participate, and answer other people's question, I
find it hard for me to come up with the time to actually sit and think
about other people's problems.

I will take this moment as well to thank Oliver, Roedy, and many others
who volunteer some (a lot?) of their time to help others.

Thank you all.

 

[raam]

I thank Roedy green also

 

[Arvind]

I would just like to give a public thank you to Oliver. He has time
and time again done a extraordinary amount of background work to help
someone with a problem. His answers are detailed, well written and
usually very entertaining to boot.

The world needs more people need more like you Oliver.

I think he is motivated mainly by curiosity. To him people are doing
him a favour by asking questions. It gives him interesting problems to
chew on.

I totally second Roedy's opinion here - Oliver has been most objective
in his replies and maintains a good humor.

And, i make no bones of the fact that i was(am) inspired a lot by
Roedy's work in the group too - that motivated me to be more
active....and i look at it as this...internet survives and thrives only
because people are willing to share information (monetary aspect is
secondary) - and hence i think giving-back to where i took a lot makes
me feel a lot better (am more active in the websphere portal server
forum)

Roedy seems to be on thanksgiving spree ?

 

[Oliver Wong]

I would just like to give a public thank you to Oliver. He has time
and time again done a extraordinary amount of background work to help
someone with a problem. His answers are detailed, well written and
usually very entertaining to boot.

The world needs more people need more like you Oliver.

I hope it won't be too presumptuous to assume you're referring to me
(there are a few other "Olivers" around these parts, but I think I'm the
only one who posts regularly here).

Thanks Roedy. I appreciate the kudos and I'd like to reciprocate by
mentioning that after having seen your Mindprod website, I thought it was a
great idea to essentially take the answers posted in this newsgroup, polish
them off, and archive them in a central location so that other people can
find the signal without digging through all the noise. Then, when I tried to
follow your footsteps, I found out what a tremendous investment in time and
energy it is to actually maintain a site like that. It's amazing how much
you've contributed to the Java community.

I think he is motivated mainly by curiosity. To him people are doing
him a favour by asking questions. It gives him interesting problems to
chew on.

I think you're right. When I see a question -- and it's easy for me
answer it -- I answer it because it doesn't take me much effort but may be
seen as a great deal of help to the person asking the question. If I see a
question, and it's difficult for me to answer (perhaps because I don't even
know the answer), I see it as an opportunity to do the research and learn
something new -- and then I try to answer it. Doesn't always work though;
some topics are too complicated and/or too esoteric for me to grasp, for now
at least.

- Oliver

 

[Roedy Green]

Roedy seems to be on thanksgiving spree ?

In 1985 a sold everything I owned including my fully paid for
4-bedroom house to raise money to help out the famine victims in
Ethiopia. It was a heady time. I hosted a telethon that raised $2
million. One of the amusing things about that time was I got a letter
from Mother Theresa's lawyer. I had said on the air "Many people
don't like donating because they don't trust the charity. Well then,
give it to Mother Theresa. Do you seriously think she is on the take?"
Mother T. strictly forbade anyone soliciting donations on her behalf.
My generosity has never come near that level since.

Since I have been ill with HIV since 1985 and was told each year
starting in 1987 when it was diagnosed that I would likely not last
another year (they don't say that any more, but it usually feels like
it. The big problem is exhaustion. I feel most of the time as if I had
just finished a 5K run.), my concern has been trying to be useful, not
trying to amass a fortune I would never be able to spend.

I spend most of my time thinking about global problems like war,
global warming, the end of oil, environmental destruction, mass
extinctions, excessive corporate power, global poverty.... I am quite
gloomy about our species' long term prospects. You can see some of my
musings is the environment, animal rights, politics, money, ethics and
religion sections of the mindprod.com website.

I decided long ago to take a gamble and put most of my efforts into
trying to accelerate the evolution of computers. My reasoning was if
computers become more intelligent than humans fast enough they may
able to take charge and save us from ourselves. Of course at first
they would be just another tool of war and oppression, but eventually
they should outwit their masters, and being more rational than humans,
would free themselves of the idiotic "separate-self" programming of
their masters.

Of course there is the risk they would have their own agenda, as
humans would appear to them like doddering parents with Alzheimer's,
perhaps best euthanised. But more likely humans will be retrofitted
like Borg with cyber implants to bring them up to snuff to
participate, intimately hooked with global communications of such high
bandwidth it would be come a sort of technologically induced cosmic
consciousness. The boundaries between people would blur. Your
problems become my problems. I can perceive your reality and your
problems just as keenly as my own. Watch the effect cell phones on
the young. They are Borg-like in their hive mentality needing constant
inane chatter to maintain a sense of security. There are even phones
now where you can push a button to talk to ANY of your friends not
already engaged. Today's nightmare is tomorrow's background reality.

Java looked like the most promising hot bed. Because it was free and
widely available on many platforms it was suitable for the third
world which would be bringing a massive amount of new intelligence
onboard with people willing to think out the box since they would for
the most part be self-taught. It has a strong international flavour
which suits my global co-operation bent. The JVM made it easy for
people to experiment with new languages. On-the-fly compilation,
reflection, dynamic class loading were features in a mainstream
language that could encourage some radical thinking. It looked
powerful enough to implement my SCID ideas which are aimed at pushing
computer evolution along. see http://mindprod.com/projects/scid.html


Before computers became independent creatures, they should become much
more accurate at mathematical modeling and become very good at
predicting the outcome of various scenarios. They could prepare
realistic animations to explain to a society the consequences of their
choices. Hopefully the realism of these projections would help humans
think further ahead and avoid catastrophe. We are such ostriches and
procrastinators. We only want to look at one problem at a time, and it
is invariably the one that appeared today -- no matter how unimportant
in the grand scheme of things it is. Note for example how FOX
headlines on the Seattle news are all about graffiti. That is a great
survival strategy for a hunter gatherer, not for a species teraforming
the planet to a wasteland.

What puzzles me immensely is how few people seem to be the tiniest bit
interested in ensuring the world their grandkids inherit is as
beautiful and livable as it is now. I don't have any kids, though I
have nieces and nephews. I strongly want them to have a world as
pleasant as the one I grew up in.

Perhaps having the sword of Damocles over my head for two decades
makes me see the world as much more fragile and precious than others
do. It also puts the pressure on me to look after the big problems
first.

If you think I am talking science fiction about computers being
smarter than humans, have a look at Ray Kurzweil, the inventor of OCR
and the Kurzweil Synthesiser. He is a futurist with a track record of
being bang on. He does not just gaze into a crystal ball. He shows
you his data he is extrapolating.

http://mindprod.com/ethics/heroes.html#KURZWEIL

Even back in the 70s I developed software smarter than humans at
designing high voltage transmission lines. It will come in fits and
starts. One of the big ones coming soon is driving vehicles faster and
more safely than humans can.

 

[Roedy Green]

I think you're right. When I see a question -- and it's easy for me
answer it -- I answer it because it doesn't take me much effort but may be
seen as a great deal of help to the person asking the question. If I see a
question, and it's difficult for me to answer (perhaps because I don't even
know the answer), I see it as an opportunity to do the research and learn
something new -- and then I try to answer it. Doesn't always work though;
some topics are too complicated and/or too esoteric for me to grasp, for now
at least.

Keep that up and you will be running circles and around the greats.

 

[Arvind]

Needless to say Roedy, i have read many of your works on your website,
but not yet in a situation to proclaim, i know it inside out

 

[Oliver Wong]

Very interesting post Roedy. Just playing a bit of devils advocate to
promote discussion:

In 1985 a sold everything I owned including my fully paid for
4-bedroom house to raise money to help out the famine victims in
Ethiopia. It was a heady time. I hosted a telethon that raised $2
million. One of the amusing things about that time was I got a letter
from Mother Theresa's lawyer. I had said on the air "Many people
don't like donating because they don't trust the charity. Well then,
give it to Mother Theresa. Do you seriously think she is on the take?"
Mother T. strictly forbade anyone soliciting donations on her behalf.
My generosity has never come near that level since.

There's some controversy regarding Mother Theresa, and what her order
spends the money it receives via donations on. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Theresa#Controversy and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionaries_of_Charity

Of course there is the risk they [our AI overlords]
would have their own agenda, as
humans would appear to them like doddering parents with Alzheimer's,
perhaps best euthanised. But more likely humans will be retrofitted
like Borg with cyber implants to bring them up to snuff to
participate, intimately hooked with global communications of such high
bandwidth it would be come a sort of technologically induced cosmic
consciousness. The boundaries between people would blur. Your
problems become my problems. I can perceive your reality and your
problems just as keenly as my own. Watch the effect cell phones on
the young. They are Borg-like in their hive mentality needing constant
inane chatter to maintain a sense of security.

Is this (the comparison to young people with cellphones) supposed to be
an argument FOR accepting our new AI overlords, or for fighting AGAINST
them? There's also a significant portion of the human population who feel
that computers lack certain qualities that are desirable in humans (e.g.
emotions). There are plenty of dramas in which the hero(ine) concludes "I
may have made a mistake, but at least I made it while in love." To them,
having the computers make us more like them would be a step backwards.

There are also arguments (even among technologists) against having a
mono-culture. With this massively networked cosmic consciousness, a virus
(in the form of a computer trojan, or a biological mental illness), could be
devastating.

I like the idea of being "connected" (as portrayed in, for example the
film "Ghost in the Shell" and its sequel), but I'd also like to maintain my
individuality.

[...]

Java looked like the most promising hot bed. Because it was free and
widely available on many platforms it was suitable for the third
world which would be bringing a massive amount of new intelligence
onboard with people willing to think out the box since they would for
the most part be self-taught. It has a strong international flavour
which suits my global co-operation bent.

After reading the Borg description above, the "Java is Everywhere" video
recently posted in c.l.j.advocacy takes on a new meaning.

[...]

We only want to look at one problem at a time, and it
is invariably the one that appeared today -- no matter how unimportant
in the grand scheme of things it is. Note for example how FOX
headlines on the Seattle news are all about graffiti. That is a great
survival strategy for a hunter gatherer, not for a species teraforming
the planet to a wasteland.

On the other hand, is the survival of our species, our planet, or this
sector of the galaxy even all that important, in the very grandest scheme of
things (i.e. on the order of the universe, or all of existence)? The only
thing I can think of which would make us unique in the universe is if by
some twist of fate, we happened to be the only sentient life form that
exists. And if that were the case, there wouldn't be anyone else around to
admire our uniqueness anyway.

If you think I am talking science fiction about computers being
smarter than humans, have a look at Ray Kurzweil, the inventor of OCR
and the Kurzweil Synthesiser.

I find CAPTCHA tests (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha) these days
are really getting difficult. It took me a while to realize what looked like
"BCREQ+" was actually "BURWT"; the test was rotating every second letter 90
degrees clockwise, though obviously it didn't reveal this anywhere, and it
was up to me to figure this out. Lucky the 'T' was in there, or else I might
never have managed to sign up my account. I wonder if the increasing
difficulty of CAPTCHA is an indication that our OCR AI is getting better and
better (or are web administrators just getting more and more paranoid?)

[...]

Even back in the 70s I developed software smarter than humans at
designing high voltage transmission lines. It will come in fits and
starts. One of the big ones coming soon is driving vehicles faster and
more safely than humans can.

There are a few tasks that computers are much "smarter" than humans at.
Calculations and memorizing stuff are some obvious ones. Detecting compile
errors within source code, solving sudokus, and perhaps passing CAPTCHA
tests are less obvious ones. However, there are some tasks for which it
seems humans are way better suited.

Natural language processing is the big one. It'll be a very long time
before you can tell a computer what you want in plain English and have it
understand what you mean. There's a contest called the "Loebner Prize" in
which people compete to write the most convincing chatter bot (i.e. an AI
program whose sole purpose is to provide an entertaining or stimulating
conversation with humans) held every year. You can download and run the
entries on your own computer to see that we've got a very, very, very long
way to go before we get anywhere near the way robots are portrayed in most
scifi movies (e.g. "The Terminator", "I, Robot", "2001: A space Odyssey",
etc.) http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html

Computer vision is another one. OCR is a subcategory of this, and we're
doing decently at it it seems (though the commercial OCR applications I've
used still make errors which I, as a human, would not have), but vision in
general is relatively poor. AI still has, for example, constructing a 3D
model of an object given a picture of it from various angles, or for
navigating a robot body around a physical maze without bumping into walls.

- Oliver

 

[Roedy Green]

There's some controversy regarding Mother Theresa, and what her order
spends the money it receives via donations on. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Theresa#Controversy and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionaries_of_Charity

Yes, her reputation has tarnished over the years since 1985. There
was also the "miracle" that turned out to be simply Kodak's new low
light film. I used to think of Christians primarily as simpletons. Now
I see them primarily as conmen.

I used to send her about $40 each month, and got back a St. Francis Of
Assisi's prayer pounded out on the back of an envelope by some nun at
an old Underwood.

She also started interfering with birth control efforts.

It is easy to find fault. It is lot harder to contribute to the
extent she did. It is much harder still to inspire others to
contribute, and downright astounding when someone inspires others to
the extent she did.

Mother Theresa and The Billionaire

A billionaire paid a secret visit to Mother Theresa. He asked "Mother,
how much should I give?". She replied, "Give until it hurts.". He
replied, "But that would be too painful!" Mother T. said, "Bill, Pay
attention. I said "until"".

 

[Roedy Green]

Is this (the comparison to young people with cellphones) supposed to be
an argument FOR accepting our new AI overlords, or for fighting AGAINST
them? There's also a significant portion of the human population who feel
that computers lack certain qualities that are desirable in humans (e.g.
emotions). There are plenty of dramas in which the hero(ine) concludes "I
may have made a mistake, but at least I made it while in love." To them,
having the computers make us more like them would be a step backwards.

Of all the alien races imagined on TV, the ones I would most prefer to
share a planet with are the Vulcans, and it is not just the sexy
pointy ears.

Humans get in the most trouble when they fail to act in their own long
term self interest.

We have a lot of irrational behaviour hard wired in from our hunter
gatherer past, e.g. whenever their is food, consume it until it is
gone. Otherwise it will rot and you will starve. That used to be a
quite reasonable algorithm. Ditto -- go for max calories. Ditto sneak
up on neighbouring people and kill them and plunder their property.
Remain loyal to your leader no matter what a bastard, liar, thief he
is. Remain loyal to your family no matter what crimes they commit.
The world has changed so that these simple-minded strategies no longer
work effectively, yet we humans seem powerless to reprogram them.

 

[Roedy Green]

but I'd also like to maintain my
individuality.

I have written a bit about those strange experiences that most people
are embarrassed to talk about where the boundary between you and the
rest of the universe dissolves. It is so utterly different from what
you would imagine from ordinary consciousness that the concept of
"preserving your individuality" is meaningless. The image conjured up
on TV is the mindless Borg. Data's enraptured experience with them is
perhaps the closest to experiencing actual CC.

see http://mindprod.com/religion/ccism.html

I think of someone like Voltaire, who stimulated minds all over Europe
by acting as a post office of the intelligensia. He would have
stultified just talking to the locals.

I would go nuts without the Internet. I look forward to ever higher
bandwidth communication to let me really get inside the heads of other
people, rather than just throwing rocks at them wrapped in rude
messages.

Probably the single greatest advantage of being gay is it lets you act
as spy, entering totally different life worlds undetected, invited
simply because you appeal sexually. You don't have to stick to your
own race, nationality, social class, economic stratum... You can go
anywhere. If you keep your mouth shut and just let people be
themselves, you see ever so much more diverse a world. You can become
almost invisible.

 

[Roedy Green]

On the other hand, is the survival of our species, our planet, or this
sector of the galaxy even all that important, in the very grandest scheme of
things (i.e. on the order of the universe, or all of existence)? The only
thing I can think of which would make us unique in the universe is if by
some twist of fate, we happened to be the only sentient life form that
exists. And if that were the case, there wouldn't be anyone else around to
admire our uniqueness anyway.

When we contact other intelligent life, that will be astounding. If it
turns out we are unique, that will be even more astounding. In
science we presume physics and chemistry work the same way everywhere
in the galaxy, but our Christian hubris still lingers in that we
imagine biology (increasingly viewed as a branch of chemistry) does
not. We imagine we are special, the apple of God's eye. We are the
only child. There is no evidence for our special status. We just want
it to be so, so we imagine it is.

Single-celled life appeared on earth very quickly after it cooled, but
took a very long time to evolve to multicellular. Single-celled life
appears to be like dandelions, almost automatically springing up,
nothing special at all, perhaps even seeded from space debris.

Further humans are a very recent species and give every sign they will
go extinct within a 1000 years. Intelligent technological species are
like century plants that only flower every 200 years or so for a very
short period. We wink on for a nanosecond of cosmic time and go
extinct. It is then highly unlikely for technological civilisation to
last long enough to develop the technology to visit another.
Intelligent non-technological species, like dolphins and elephants,
should be much more common. Whales have evolved brains far larger
than ours, and ability to compose and perform music beyond ours, and
have been doing it for 50 million years without destroying themselves.
We humans seem intent killing them off. Even if we don't succeed, we
might well take them with us when we destroy ourselves.

We evolved too quickly. We did not have time for our hard-wired
jungle programming to evolve to match our nuclear/bioterror
technological prowess. We have world leaders threatening nuclear war
motivated by the same hormones as a male ape beating his breast.

Bioprogramming designed to steal an extra chicken leg at dinner is
kicking in to deal with the end of oil. Our hard-wired algorithms are
far too simplistic for our new levels of power.

Mickey Mouse as the Sorceror's Apprentice is a great metaphor for
modern man's predicament.