pbw

30 ms·

301.
by pbw 13y ago
Most people believe their dogs are less conscious than they are, but more conscious than gold fish, etc. I agree AI will achieve various levels of consciousness at various times, starting well below us and ending up well above us.
302.
by pbw 13y ago
It will entirely be a question of politics, not science or philosophy. The track record is we deny rights to those we deem too different from us, then we later see the light and include them. Think about women or other races. This will happ
303.
by pbw 13y ago
That simulated rain doesn't get anyone wet is an old saw. But it's a straw man, no one would claim otherwise. Simulated rain on a computer is just bits of electricity coursing through wires, where rain is droplets of H20 free fall
304.
by pbw 13y ago
A rich modern society will spend most of its money on two things: education and health-care. The appetite for education will increase so quickly that in-person degree programs will continue to do okay as premium offerings even as online deg
305.
by pbw 13y ago
from the article "Suppose you are in a self-driving car going across a narrow bridge, and a school bus full of children hurtles out of control towards you. There is no room for the vehicles to pass each other. Should the self-driving car ta
306.
by pbw 13y ago
This idea of a human-in-the-loop whose role diminishes over time will recur with many AI related technologies. Imagine call centers today with automated attendants backed by fleets of humans to handle all the special cases and frustrated ca
307.
Will Google's Ray Kurzweil Live Forever?(online.wsj.com)
9 points by pbw 14y ago|1 comments
308.
by pbw 14y ago
July 1995... the years are above the months.
309.
Why is Chrome's English dictionary so bad?
4 points by pbw 14y ago|2 comments
310.
by pbw 14y ago
Kurzweil is pointing at the brain and saying "pattern recognition" the way someone might point at a car and say "combustion". He's asserting this is the core mechanism that makes it go. McGinn instead expects him explain all aspects of thou
311.
by pbw 14y ago
Kurzweil doesn't believe individual neurons have mental processes. McGinn doesn't believe Kurzweil believes individual neurons have mental processes. It's just a pet peeve of McGinn, it's completely immaterial to the book. I agree in an aca
312.
by pbw 14y ago
You absolutely could understand Windows by studying the CPU, you latch on to some of the traces and record all the signals going by. That's what electrophysiology is. Oh, there's KERNEL32.DLL, I wonder if that's important, let's look at the
313.
by pbw 14y ago
McGinn says that "thinking about London while in Miami" involves no pattern recognition, because no senses are involved. But Kurzweil's claim is pattern recognition is key to memory , and certainly memory is involved when recollecting Lond
314.
by pbw 14y ago
So sure there are low-level details that must be understood for any brain, but come on, 300 vs. 100B? Once the big projects have cracked the low-level details, someone will figure out C. elegans. Until we have some smaller organisms emulate
315.
by pbw 14y ago
That 2nd link is an obvious straw man. If you read what Gates is actually saying [1] it's far more reasonable. There is a huge dynamic range in teacher abilities. He is saying take the very best, and give them a slightly higher load. Just a
316.
by pbw 14y ago
Granted, so let's put optimization out of the picture. I still claim what Gates is doing is more than unqualified "science". I suppose it is "applied science" but that seems like a weak term. My point is just there is a difference between a
317.
by pbw 14y ago
I don't think optimization of the world is exactly science. Science is about the acquisition of knowledge. Understanding what causes Polio is science, how it spreads, etc. Changing the world in such a way as to get rid of Polio strikes me a
318.
by pbw 14y ago
As Gates points out in the article, these techniques existed before computers. So I agree given Gates's background, he is probably applying what he learned from computers to wider problems. But in the grand scheme of things, computer scienc
319.
by pbw 14y ago
http://vine.co/blog says "Today we're launching Vine... Vine has been acquired by Twitter." So that was fast.
320.
by pbw 14y ago
The article says Dell would be valued at $22B such that Microsoft would be a "bit player" with $1-3B. Yet it says Microsoft would "influence the direction of the company" and could "push back against such plans" [to reinvent itself away fro
321.
by pbw 14y ago
Kurzweil's whole thing is exponential growth. He is fond of recounting that the Human Genome project was 1% done half-way through the project, seven years in. This in fact was right on schedule, they finished 99% of the project in the final
322.
by pbw 14y ago
Thomas waves his hands and says "the brain is really complicated". He doesn't address how much complexity needs to be modeled, but he implies a lot of it does. Kurzweil says a "sufficiently complex" program will exhibit consciousness. So t
323.
by pbw 14y ago
Kurzweil's Discover article says if we build a sufficiently complex machine it will be conscious as fully as humans are conscious. And he says we might do this by 2029. This blog post says there are all sorts of low-level physical processes
324.
by pbw 14y ago
Seems sad, I'd like to see Kurzweil form another startup and get bought by Google, rather than go work for them. I assume he could self-fund something, I don't how his hedge funds are doing. But maybe he's been there and done that, and want
325.
by pbw 14y ago
Reduced mortality from heart disease seems to account for essentially all the mortality reduction. How are we reducing deaths so much in the face of rising obesity, etc.?
326.
by pbw 14y ago
Yes I think you'd want to do a lot of extrapolation, at least for the next 80 years. You could imagine a hierarchy of simulations which dynamically adjusted the level of detail. Do you simulate every cell division to see if cancer develops,
327.
by pbw 14y ago
http://www.stanford.edu/~jkarr/research.html look for "more information" links to animations, etc. http://wholecell.stanford.edu/ contains a link to the code (written in matlab)
328.
by pbw 14y ago
How does this impact site traffic? They are taking popular queries and providing the answer to them on a google.com hosted page. Does that mean less click-throughs to actual result pages? Does that bother anyone?
329.
by pbw 14y ago
I don't like "would you kill X or Y" questions. For one details matter, and we have no details. For two it's just impossible to say sitting here in my comfy chair how I would react in some dire life-or-death situation.
330.
by pbw 14y ago
Both copies would claim to be you, and would have equal right to that claim. Yet each copy would be a fully conscious person and would immediately diverge into its own individual from the shared point on. This of course sounds like a contra

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