Re: How Robots Will Steal Your Job

[CyberLegend aka Jure Sah]

Yes you did.

Let me see now, by your own argument,
by changing the order of what you put down below, I see that from the "f" in
"reformatted", the "u" in "quote". the "c" in "correct" and the
"k" in "know" that you have used a very rude word.

Shame on you.

Quit it.

Observer aka DustWolf aka CyberLegend aka Jure Sah

C'ya!

--
Cellphone: +38640809676 (SMS enabled)

Don't feel bad about asking/telling me anything, I will always gladly
reply.

"Yes, Master."

Have you been told Internet will always be
threatened by worms viruses etc? We don't think so:
http://www.aimetasearch.com/ici/index.htm

MesonAI -- If nobody else wants to do it, why shouldn't we?(TM)

 

[CyberLegend aka Jure Sah]

When we build a machine, or write a program, it is fragile.
The slightest error, and it does not work. "Learning" programs,
like speech recognition or handwriting recognition do not learn
well, do not generalize well.

Biological systems have been selected for robustness, but when
we try to design for robustness, it is difficult.

LOL.

Biological systems have relied on bulk data quite a lot. Add 10 MB worth
of useless data to a 30 byte program and it will become just as robust
as DNA.

Observer aka DustWolf aka CyberLegend aka Jure Sah

C'ya!

--
Cellphone: +38640809676 (SMS enabled)

Don't feel bad about asking/telling me anything, I will always gladly
reply.

"Yes, Master."

Have you been told Internet will always be
threatened by worms viruses etc? We don't think so:
http://www.aimetasearch.com/ici/index.htm

MesonAI -- If nobody else wants to do it, why shouldn't we?(TM)

 

[Airy R Bean]

The people who should, perhaps, "quit it" are those who have
an alternative agenda about posting styles; an agenda that is
irrelevant to this NG in particular and to Usenet in general,
and who try to masquerade their emotional intolerance as
another cause.

 

[Airy R Bean]

Humour. Lost on you?

As a mater of fact I have never seen a shop selling Kentucky Fried
Chicken. I don't live in the USA.
It would be curious to know what your point was tho.

 

[soft-eng]

If you take out the "NON-" part, the quote is accurate.
The "consciousness" connotations in Quantum Physics go all
the way back to master politician Bohr in Copenhagen.

 

[soft-eng]

Indeed. I don't assume mechanical sentience is possible. It may
well be--and if it is, someday we'll find that out--but my opinion
right now is that it may not be.

Of course not. Why would a machine need "sentience", a concept
carefully formulated for the purpose of justifying (i.e. satisfying
internal psychological inconsistencies involved in) the killing
and eating of animals?

 

[Roedy Green]

In any case, you seem to be not offering evidence of code
in Forth, but code in "Abundance".

In one sense Abundance in a new language. In another it is a Forth
Application. In another is a Forth library.

But is typical of the way you work in Forth, creating new SYNTAX as
well as new methods for making it easy to tersely specify problems in
some initialialiser domain.

You have the full power of the language both when you compile and when
you run.

Imagine if in Java you could look up data on the internet at compile
time, process it into a binary object, and bundle that as the static
initialisation constant, or do your localisation at compile time to
produce code tuned to a particular customer (and not much use to
anyone else).

The thing that is so amazing that you don't appreciate until you see
it, is that every scrap of bubblegum taken out of the application
makes more STRUCTURE shine through. Repeat this cycle and your app
gets pruned astoundingly. A report becomes a simple list of fields
you want to see. A screen layout is a list of fields with a few tiny
layout hinting words. file/io is transparent. You don't actually
have to explicitly read or write any records. You code as if the file
were totally in RAM.

Java is moving slowly in that direction with the new for :, but you
have to wait for Gosling. With Forth, if you want new syntax, e.g. a
SWITCH that accepts ranges, its yours in 30 minutes.

I am not suggesting that Forth is the way to go for every problem. It
has many warts. However, it annoys me that people trash it without
taking the time to understand its magic which is entirely missing in
the algol family of languages which to a Forth guy, are all the same
with the semicolons rearranged.

 

[Bent C Dalager]

I would say due to the point evolution makes: We've all been evolving
for the same amount of time, humans cannot be said to be in any way
supperior to dogs.

Evolution doesn't guarantee that two different species achieve the
same "adapted"ness within the same amount of time. Evolution tends
towards local maxima and we may very well have hit upon a better local
maximum than what dogs have.

Cheers
Bent D

 

[Bent C Dalager]

Of course not. Why would a machine need "sentience", a concept
carefully formulated for the purpose of justifying (i.e. satisfying
internal psychological inconsistencies involved in) the killing
and eating of animals?

I doubt we need any excuse at all for eating things (I certainly
don't). The theory of sentience sounds a lot more like something we
could use to _avoid_ eating some things if we find out they're
sentient.

And I expect a lot of people would still need a good bit of
convincing.

Cheers
Bent D

 

[Roedy Green]

The theory of sentience sounds a lot more like something we
could use to _avoid_ eating some things if we find out they're
sentient.

This guilt about eating animals goes way way back in our history
according to Joseph Campbell. Originally man did not consider himself
superior to the animals. It was necessary to apologise to them for
killing them, and to provide the appropriate rituals so they could be
reborn.

Kosher and Halal are a bit like that today, requiring some reverence
and care in the killing of animals.


Modern day Jains take this to extremes. They won't go out a certain
times of say for fear of squashing bugs. Walking is discouraged to
avoid harming life in the ground. Even fruit should fall from the
tree before being eaten.

I still don't know for sure what people mean when they say "aware",
"sentient" or "conscious". I suspect the definition has to do with
how much guilt they feel about consuming some animal. People don't
like the idea of cannibalism or anything too close.

They seem overly eager to dismiss any evidence that whales and
dolphins may be in some ways even more intelligent than they are.

I get angry emails from people calling me a racist because I protest
the killing of whales for religious purposes,
http://mindprod.com/whale.html
Many people even persist in calling cetacea "fish" to help salve their
consciences about murdering them.

 

[R. Steve Walz]

There is a guy who builds little robots, using biological principles.
He discovered they use far less electronics, and when they fail, they
fail gracefully, gradually losing capability, rather than coming to a
dead stop the way most computer programs do.
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.

---------------
You're blathering about Mark Tilden, and he has dug himself into a
hole at Los Alamos and can't get out. He has been fooling the govt
into believing he has been doing groudbreaking work when he is
actually revisiting 70 year old patents for pinball machine circuits.

He propagates the myth that little robot toys which have a few simple
emergent properties, and which include random RC timing loop circuits,
are somehow transcendant of processor technology, and that's been
shown to be dead-end crap. I think he is now being investigated by
the OMB.

-Steve

 

[R. Steve Walz]

If you take out the "NON-" part, the quote is accurate.
The "consciousness" connotations in Quantum Physics go all
the way back to master politician Bohr in Copenhagen.

 

[R. Steve Walz]

If you take out the "NON-" part, the quote is accurate.

 

[Roedy Green]

You're blathering about Mark Tilden,

The guy I am referring to made no such elaborate claims, at least not
in the clip I saw of his little beasts. It would have been on some
video I got at the library. Sorry I can't be more specific.

 

[R. Steve Walz]

The guy I am referring to made no such elaborate claims, at least not
in the clip I saw of his little beasts. It would have been on some
video I got at the library. Sorry I can't be more specific.

 

[Roedy Green]

how do you define those two terms?

Let us try to get some definitions for:

aware
sentient
conscious

I'd think you could use the term aware even for a vacuum cleaner that
avoided obstacles. It is aware of its environment in that it senses
it, and reacts to it. Rocks don't appear to be aware.

My Oxford defines sentient as having the power to perceive via the
senses. This suggest only animals could be sentient. Perception by
other means does not count.

Conscious implies aware. It also implies an internal experience.
Perhaps it implies pain and pleasure. If something is not conscious,
it there is much less reason to avoid "hurting" it.

I know from having undergone anaesthesia that the experience
disappears when I go unconscious. It is not like sleep. Consciousness
seems to be associated with a certain degree of brain activity.

We might not be able to measure consciousness directly, but we can
measure brain activity.

We can only guess if that same degree of activity also indicates
consciousness in other species. It may require a lower or higher
amount for other brain designs.

You could find out with human experiments to anaesthetize only parts
of the brain, and see if even a small amount of the brain awake causes
consciousness, or if you need the whole thing functioning.

Part of the catch is, a human could be awake, but unconscious in the
sense of having no internal experience, and protest they were
conscious. We would never know they were "lying". They might not be
lying, just acting normally.

We need an indicator that tracks the subjective measure of just how
rich an internal experience you are having.

You then measure that indicator in other species, and use that to
decide if they are likely conscious, not your gut feelings.

 

[Roedy Green]

blather means "loquacious nonsense"

I think my report was accurate, even if you discredit the guy's work.
I do run on often, but I think I described that succinctly.

Are you aware of the term "gratuitous insult"?

 

[R. Steve Walz]

A lot of animals communicate with one another. None of them have come
up with a cross-species language (that we know), but then, neither
have we.

Your criteria for accepting something not human as being intelligent
is that it should be a lot more intelligent than we are to even be
considered?

Cheers
Bent D

 

[Corey Murtagh]

This is a totally humanocentric pile of bullshit, not to mention being
logically invalid. Humans can speak a handful of languages, most of
which are related to one of about 5 or 6 roots. Learning a new language
requires assistance from someone who knows the other language, and
preferably knows yours as well. It takes a /very/ long time for two
people with no common language between them to learn each other's language.

Several years ago, during the height of the space craze, a number of
attempts were made to create a system to initiate communication with an
intelligent creature with no familiar language. Lots of linguists
devoted insane amounts of effort, and they eventually came up with a
system that all agreed was very good. Until they tested it. The test
subjects had no common root languages with the testers, were judged to
be of high intelligence, and yet several weeks passed without a single
advancement in communication. From memory the whole project was dropped
at that point, since if it couldn't be used to communicate with an
intelligent subject who was so similar to the testers in every respect
other than language, then what hope did the system have of working with
an intelligent being with a potentially /very/ different mental structure?

But then from what you've already said, if it can't come and make itself
intelligible to /us/, then you don't class it as intelligent.

All you've proved so far is that you mind is more closed than Fort Knox.

 

[Roedy Green]

there IS a discontinuity in anatomy.

The human brain is made of three parts, sometimes called the
reptitilian brain, the mammalian brain and the rational brain.

Reptiles have only the reptilian part. It deals with basic survival
like respiration and eating.

Mammals have the reptilian part and the mammalian part. One thing the
mammalian brain handles is emotions.

Then there is the rational brain that handles things like deductive
reasoning.

Some psychological troubles can be traced to the imperfect integration
of the three. They can be at odds.

If you use that is your discrimination of value or intelligence, you
run in to a problem. Elephants and whales have much larger rational
brains that humans do.

Those tarred with religious-induced species chauvinism argue their
larger brains do not count because these animals have bigger bodies.

This is invalid on three grounds.

1. Whales have no more complex musculature than humans.

2. the fine control of musculature is not done by the rational brain.

3. brontosauri managed to control humongous bodies with brains smaller
than a walnut.