Re: How Robots Will Steal Your Job

[Roedy Green]

Another is that most or all new
civilizations at some point face a great filter that is as yet
unknown to us, and most or all don't make it past that barrier.
The filter could be a high likelihood of self-destruction or
self-reduction (back to stone age)

This is what appears likely to me.


We humans charge ahead with the enthusiasm appropriate for an activity
that has only local consequences, where the consequences are planetary
destruction. I think particularly of the football game enthusiasm that
developed in the Iraq/Korean crises.

People tell me, "don't worry your pretty little head about that, we
haven't blown ourselves up (or other predicted catastrophe) yet".

This is the reasoning of the naive homosexual who has unprotected sex,
convinced condoms are not necessary. "Nothing bad has happened so far.
The predictions of doom were totally WRONG, and probably made by
people with ulterior motives."

We have so stirred the pot, there are at least a dozen scenarios
whereby we could send ourselves back to the stone age. To survive even
1000 years, we must "throw heads" on each of those perils every day of
those thousand years.

Before, we never had the power to destroy ourselves on such a scale.
We have not evolved the appropriate inhibitions.

The other thing we have never had before is the power to shape the
world so far into the future. We, as a species, don't think more than
a year ahead. Many of the traps we are laying for ourselves manifest
slowly, and can't be turned around quickly. We are used to crisis
management.

If we do contact an extraterrestrial culture, chances are we will
consider them preposterously cautious and future oriented.

The irony is, superstition and stupidity could be our greatest allies
for long term survival, slowing down the pace of cultural evolution.

 

[Hans-Georg Michna]

You make a fundamental mistake. You look at today's computers,
find no intelligence, and deduce that computers or robots can
never have intelligence.

You ignore that today's computers generally have a much lower
data processing performance than a human brain and that computer
technology is progressing fast.

Hans-Georg

 

[Jesse Nowells]

Here is yet another definition of consciousness -- worthy of rights.

Great. Make rights depend upon a thing that can't be clearly define, or
could mean different things depending on who or what you refer to. This is
a recipe for disaster.

 

[Jeff Fox]

There are many different forms of Forth code as well as styles of
writing Forth. The inventor of Forth has stated that it should be
100 times more compact than the equivalent C code. Of course the
people who start by writing a Forth in C cannot achieve this level
of brevity in their code, but many will claim that it should be
10 times more compact than C. There are also examples of Forth
code being far more than 100x smaller than the equivalent C code
but 100 may be a good average for Mr. Moore. The most extreme
examples are quite dramatic such as Mr. Moore's VLSI CAD software
projects. Less experienced Forth programmers who have coded a
number of problems in Java and Forth for comparison reported
5 to 10x more compact Forth code than Java bytecode without
making an effort to write compact Forth code. Forth is also
very well suited to robotics and AI. Unfortunately, as far
as newsgroups are concerned, the best examples are either
proprietary commercial code or classified projects.

 

[Mark I Manning IV]

well ive been away for a while because i had to give up my internet
connection due to not having worked in 2 years (ouch) - anyway im back
now (and working too and i felt i had to reply to this..

in response to mr roedy greens "prove it" attitude (maybe not a bad
attitude) i could point in the direction of my isforth. There is quite
a bit of code in there - i might direct him towards the curses
replacenemt code which adds 6524 bytes to the overall size of the
UN-turnkeyd extended compiler -

give me the same functionality in a c based project in that many bytes!

btw - hi everyone, ltns

 

[Bernd Paysan]

There are also examples of Forth
code being far more than 100x smaller than the equivalent C code
but 100 may be a good average for Mr. Moore. The most extreme
examples are quite dramatic such as Mr. Moore's VLSI CAD software
projects.

I think the compactness is a function of the complexity of the task at hand.
If it's a trivial task (say it can be solved by 3 lines of C code), usually
the C code wins (is more compact). If it's modestly complex, say a few
hundred lines of C code, Forth may be 2-5 times more compact. If it's
highly complex, say some million lines of C code, the only comparable Forth
project you are able to find does things all quite different, and comes
close to the factor 100.

 

[Roedy Green]

You ignore that today's computers generally have a much lower
data processing performance than a human brain and that computer
technology is progressing fast.

By Moore's law, which has held ever since 1900,

$1000 of computing buys you today about 1 dragon fly brain of
computing power.

By 2010 it will be one mouse brain.

By 2030 it will be one human brain.

By 2060 it will be the combined power of all humans on earth.

If cars had improved at the rate computers have, they would cost under
a cent and travel faster than light.

Technologies have a threshold. Below a certain level of competency
they are preposterous, foolish, ridiculous. An infinitessimal higher
they are interesting. A tiny bit higher they are practical. This is
why they sneak up on you.


Think of some of the things not that long ago we said machines could
never do:

1. understand natural language (albeit about a restricted universe of
objects).

2. write stories.

3. compose music in the style of JS Bach

4. play ping pong

5. recognise faces

6. play master level chess

7. prove theorems

8. pick stocks

9. improvise jazz

10. diagnose an electrocardiogram

11. take dictation

12. translate languages.

13. analyse visual images

As we study the brain, we discover its tricks, and refine its
algorithms. We are finding the magic we humans do with our brains is
not so magic after all.

One thing to remember is there are only 8 million neurons in your
neuro cortex -- the part of the brain that lets you reason. This is
not that big a deal. The bulk of your brain (100 billion neurons) is
concerned with the same things that concern a squirrel.

The active part of the human genetic code is about 23 MB, about the
same the source for MS Word.

We are going to feel so silly and so puffed up when we encounter
beings more intelligent than us, even if it is we who create them.

 

[Roedy Green]

How about downloading the BBL forth interpreter. It simulates a 32 bit
machine on 16 bit hardware. It comparable in complexity to the JVM.
You will see it is considerably smaller.

see http://mindprod.com/products.html#BBL

 

[Jeff Fox]

in response to mr roedy greens "prove it" attitude (maybe not a bad
attitude) i could point in the direction of my isforth.

Actually it was Mr. Green who made the statement that Forth code
as compact and it was someone else who asked for proof. But he
also did not want to have to browse a url. ;-)

I did not intend to cross post to so many newsgroups. I will try
harder in the future to avoid that sort of cross posting.

Best Wishes,
Jeff Fox

 

[Corey Murtagh]

This quote is from Airy R Bean. I see you still haven't decided to play
ball with attributions. Are you really trying to make life difficult
for the rest of us? Or does your newsreader not support threading?

How about downloading the BBL forth interpreter. It simulates a 32 bit
machine on 16 bit hardware. It comparable in complexity to the JVM.
You will see it is considerably smaller.

I have no doubt that a Forth interpreter is smaller than a JVM. What I
/do/ doubt is that it is more complex.

From memory Forth has a core instruction set of about 20 instructions,
and everything is (or at least /can/ be, although common functionality
is often added as native code) built from there. A JVM has a whole lot
more core instructions, plus object lifetime management, plus garbage
collection, plus... the list goes on.

None of those things are /impossible/ in Forth, but they're not core
functionality of Forth. At best they're addins in the same way that the
various Java modules are... and thus the complexity is moved out of the
interpreter.

 

[Roedy Green]

All I have asserted is that there is a speed component to
intelligence. If entity A can come up with a solution faster than
entity B, it is more intelligent.

some definitions of intelligence:

the ability to achieve complex goals in a complex environment, or the
ability of working and adapting to the environment with insufficient
knowledge and resources.

Ray Kurzweil defines it as the ability to use limited resources,
including time, to achieve a set of goals (which may include survival,
communication, solving problems, recognising patterns, performing
skills). The products of intelligence may be clever, ingenious,
insightful or elegant.

R. W. Young defines it as that faculty of mind by which order is
perceived in a situation previously considered disordered.

To fairly adjudicate artificial intelligence the way you would
adjudicate the skill of a magician. I maintain that how the result is
achieved must be irrelevant. You must examine the intelligence in a
black box. What we usually do is peek inside, and if we understand how
the magic was achieved, suddenly decide that what we just saw was not
real intelligence after all, just a cheap trick. I conjecture that all
human intelligence is just a cheap trick. The reason we put it on such
a pedestal is that we don't understand all the tricks yet. We evolved
these powers very quickly. They can't be all that profound.

 

[Roedy Green]

This quote is from Airy R Bean. I see you still haven't decided to play
ball with attributions.

My must you be so dense as to fail to notice the deeply nested >.

This is obviously something he quoted. It does not matter who said it
originally. I am responding to the idea.

 

[Corey Murtagh]

My must you be so dense as to fail to notice the deeply nested >.

Now who was it that was bitching about people attributing meaning he
hadn't intended? Oh, that would be you, right?

I never once claimed that I /couldn't/ find the correct attributions,
just that your style makes it more difficult to do so.

I've been trying to figure out what your problem actually is. Why not
just respond to the original message rather than some deeply-nested
quote of it? Is it that hard to do? You baffle me.

This is obviously something he quoted. It does not matter who said it
originally. I am responding to the idea.

You yourself, in your list of 'problems' with current news/email systems
at the link you posted earlier, commented on the poor support for
correct attributions. I find this hard to reconcile with your apparent
view that attributions are irrelevant.

Of course there's always the possibility that you're doing it to piss me
off. I've half-decided that you're a troll several times, but I keep
letting you convince me otherwise. Maybe it's finally time to reach for
the killfile button.

 

[R. Steve Walz]

No one now. But in 1800 no one thought a horse or a slave should
either.

I don't think we should have a closed mind on this especially since we
have no way of measuring consciousness yet. If at some point
artificial human companions start demanding civil rights, and if they
behave in all ways as if they deserved them, and they claim to have
internal experience, how are we to know they are lying?

--------------------
Conscious may NOT mean they demand rights, and demanding rights may
not mean they are conscious. These could well be different things.
A program intent on winning may be able to do a non-conscious analysis
of the elements of the problem and arrive at the same demands that
some conscious beings might BECAUSE THEY ARE conscious, while the
conscious entity may be totally pleased to be a slave by its instincts,
and worship us as lover/gods and desire only that! Robots, to function,
don't have to have evolved with survival or procreative skills. They
might be just as consciously happy to serve us and not reproduce or
even protect themselves. Nor do they have to mutate in any manner that
our form of life had to to effect Darwinian natural selection and
random mutation. Learning can be memetic without being fundamental to
their nature.

-Steve

 

[R. Steve Walz]

"Particles appear not to decide where they have been until forced to
do so by being observed. The implication is that portions of the world
we live in are not actually "rendered" until some conscious observer
turns her attention towards them. After all, there's no point wasting
valuable "computes" of the celestial computer than renders our
Universe. This gives new meaning to the question about the unheard
tree that falls in the forest."
~ Ray Kurzweil

It would seem highly strange for the universe to not bother rendering
itself until humans came along. Something that fundamental surely is
not specific to man. It sounds pretty darn low-level.
Roedy Green.

-----------------
This is what I mean by all reality being strictly subjective.

There hasn't been and cannot even be conceived to be any other way of
experiencing the existence of any physical reality than without a
saubjective observer doing the observing.

It would seem then, that all existence only occurs in a packet called
a Lifetime, and not in any supposed Universe that has any existence
without us, and that the things we perceive with what we think of as
our senses, something supposedly "other" than ourself, even though we
don't fathom the set of things called our body any better, are part of
our Lifetime, and not any separate external physical universe upon
which we actually depend for existence in a truly causative fashion.
This notion of a "physical universe" has no existence other than our
perception of it as a part of our Lifetime, and nothing we will EVER
perceive in our lives can be shown to really be qualitatively different
than a thought, since where we are is itself our notion, a construct
of thoughts, and not any demonstrably separate "thing", nor is there
any supposedly physical "matter" that is more than one of our ideas!

Admittedly these different kinds of ideas need names, the ones we have
given them, body, world, universe, atoms, but these must be recognized
for what they really are, stories in the mind we seem to share, we
apparently do not even have a mind of our own, we inhabit it together,
at least the part that seems "physical" or shared, while our mind is
apparently private to us to a degree, yet in many ways not so private.

We say that we have "abstraction", that our mind has ideas "about"
things that are other than ideas, but we have never and will never
see any such thing as something that is "other than an idea", because
what we see is all there is, and all we see is merely our idea of it.
There is nothing "about" which we have ideas, because what it looks
like it is, *IS* our idea of its existence WHICH IS ITS ONLY EXISTENCE.

People get confused here and imagine that ideas are wispy insubstantial
things that couldn't possibly be "all there is", it "feels too solid",
forgetting that the solidity of every substance is itself just an
idea!!

If a tree falls in the forest and YOU don't see it, then it doesn't.
There is NO behind you till you look there, the back of your head
only exists as sensations, there is NO life unless you live it, there
is no universe than the one your life shows you, and the Imagination
that gives birth to the galaxies is what has put you here, in all the
lives who are reading these words right now, and each of you are
the same person, the one who thinks the common thought that "I'm ME
HERE and NOW! The supposed solidity and continuity of a physical
universe is merely a story about life that Life has taught you.


-Steve

 

[Roedy Green]

My must you be so dense as to fail to notice the deeply nested >.

This is obviously something he quoted. It does not matter who said it
originally. I am responding to the idea.

I am frustrated. That was a quote nested four levels deep. For Baud
shake, everyone, stop quoting so much. We've heard it all before. To
expect someone to keep attributions straight four levels deep manually
is just too prissy. It is a waste of time.

When posting, get to the point. All we need is a sentence or two at
most quoted to put your quote in context.

Now if someone wants to implement a protocol for tracking attributions
automatically, I'd be happy to use it. See
http://mindprod.com/projmailreadernewsreader.html

I get the impression when people apologetically write "snipped" that
they think they are supposed to recapitulate the entire thread in
every post. Every message would get longer and longer until a thread
died by sheer message size.

 

[Roedy Green]

Conscious may NOT mean they demand rights, and demanding rights may
not mean they are conscious. These could well be different things.

But whether you feel they should be granted may largely depend on your
own personal assessment of whether the beings "asking" for rights are
truly conscious.

This consideration even applies to chickens.

My experiences with chickens have convinced me they are very stupid
birds, but they do exhibit emotions, and definitely express distress.

Therefore I refuse to eat eggs unless they are from free run chickens.

It will be a major problem circa 2040 when artificial intelligences
are cleverer than us. If they demand rights, we really won't be in a
position to say no, whether we think we are being silly or not.

 

[Roedy Green]

A program intent on winning may be able to do a non-conscious analysis
of the elements of the problem and arrive at the same demands

We have pretty weak arguments to convince each other that species X is
conscious or not conscious. This won't necessarily always be so.

Some work in quantum mechanics may give us a profound clue into what
consciousness is. It might then become objectively measurable.

Maybe someone will prove that consciousness IS quantum decoherence, or
the two are inextricably twinned.

Maybe someone poking around in a brain will discover a spot that when
stimulated increases the subjective intensity of experience. That
might give us a clue to what it is.

Perhaps artificial intelligences an order of magnitude cleverer than
us can crack the problem, then explain to dimwitted little us why they
must necessarily be either conscious or unconscious.

 

[Roedy Green]

I've been trying to figure out what your problem actually is. Why not
just respond to the original message rather than some deeply-nested
quote of it? Is it that hard to do? You baffle me.

Because I have the thought while reading the message that has quoted
four levels deep. Worrying about attributions is the sign of a petty
egotistical mind. If you playing one upmanship games, trying to prove
people wrong, trying to twist others words and claim they said
something they did not mean, then all this attributions stuff is
important. If you are interested in the ideas, then it makes not a
rat's ass difference who said what.

 

[Roedy Green]

This notion of a "physical universe" has no existence other than our
perception of it as a part of our Lifetime, and nothing we will EVER
perceive in our lives can be shown to really be qualitatively different
than a thought, since where we are is itself our notion, a construct
of thoughts, and not any demonstrably separate "thing", nor is there
any supposedly physical "matter" that is more than one of our ideas!

This sounds like the Buddhist world view. It is a practical point of
view because it points how much of your experience is your creation.
It is easier to change your creation than try to shape up the outside
world you are hallucinating.

I think nearly everyone suffers the extreme delusion they are
experiencing a very close approximation to objective reality.
Instead, they are experiencing a Reader's Digest version of reality,
warped by memory, emotion, prejudice, and the limitations of our
senses.

One simple experiment is to ask people who said what after a fight.
They all heard and saw quite different things.

The thing that bothers me about this view is all the evidence the
universe got along just fine without us for billions of years.

Even without us to applaud, the universe unfolded.