Kurzweil Argues Technology Improves The World, Compares DNA to Code (geekwire.com) 203
Futurist Ray Kurzweil told a Seattle conference specific ways in which technology is already improving our lives. For example, while there's a general perception that the world's getting worse, "What's actually happening is our information about what's wrong in the world is getting better. A century ago, there would be a battle that wiped out the next village, you'd never even hear about it." An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes two of Kurzweil's other interesting insights:
"We're only crowded because we've crowded ourselves into cities. Try taking a train trip across the United States, or Europe or Asia or anywhere in the world. Ninety-nine percent of the land is not used... we don't want to use it because you don't want to be out in the boondocks if you don't have people to work and play with. That's already changing now that we have some level of virtual communication..."
[And on the potential of human genomics] "It's not just collecting what is basically the object code of life that is expanding exponentially. Our ability to understand it, to reverse-engineer it, to simulate it, and most importantly to reprogram this outdated software is also expanding exponentially. Genes are software programs. It's not a metaphor. They are sequences of data. But they evolved many years ago, many tens of thousands of years ago..."
[And on the potential of human genomics] "It's not just collecting what is basically the object code of life that is expanding exponentially. Our ability to understand it, to reverse-engineer it, to simulate it, and most importantly to reprogram this outdated software is also expanding exponentially. Genes are software programs. It's not a metaphor. They are sequences of data. But they evolved many years ago, many tens of thousands of years ago..."
what happened to ask Ray Kurzweil anything? (Score:5, Interesting)
Several months back there was a call for questions for Ray Kurzweil. https://features.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
Whatever happened to the answers?
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They probably were too stupid to publish...
We're just waiting for the singularity.
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Like some cults wait for the world to end?
crowded (Score:4, Interesting)
Has he even been in the Netherlands ? This place IS crowded. We do not have ANY unused space, there is no such thing as "out in the boondocks" here. Even the bits that appear unused are actually carefully managed pieces of 'nature'. Not a single tree there is allowed to fall over without it being discussed in a meeting somewhere.
I have news for Mr Kurzweil. Crowded is not defined in terms of how much more people you can shoehorn in. Crowded is defined in terms of how easy it is to escape the other assholes in case you do so desire.
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Finally, after all this time, quite a number of centuries in fact, we have finally figured out why they called it the Netherlands.
Are we going to argue about it NOW, ffs?
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You premises are wrong:
You define "crowded" one way, and claim Kurtzweil does not follow (your rather arbitrary definition).
You seem to equate "nature" with "unused bits of land (by humans)", thats wrong, because humans are part of nature, even if you re-define nature to mean something like "all life except humans", then wrong too, because every bit of surface of this planet has been touched by humans, and is therefore "used" by humans. The ocean is where we store our unwanted plastc, the Arctic and Antarct
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I lived in the Netherlands. Ray is spot on there, too. Even driving the long hour and a half on the highway from Amsterdam to Rotterdam, one giant supercity, you pass through many more miles of open farmland than urban area, dotted with villages. And inland it is almost solid farmland.
Ray is right. There is a ton of room to move out of cities there without addecting farmland use much (to say nothing of improving farming techniques that will more than compensate, i.e. food prices will continue to drop ov
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So that's not unused land, it's the land required to feet the huge cities.
Ninety-nine percent of the land is not used... (Score:4, Interesting)
10 million people live in, say, around Los Angeles. But to supply those 10 million people with water a fair percent of the watershed of California is tapped. If 1 million people moved into the all that mostly empty land between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, where are they going to get water?
In, say, parts of New York of the south, water is more abundant. But to feed 10 million people anywhere takes land to grow food, to find a place to dispose of their sewage and trash, etc. etc.
Determining how much land is required support each person has actually been studied. 2-9 acres is one range; there are a lot of variables.
10 million people may live around Los Angeles, but they *off of* a lot more land.
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"10 million people live in, say, around Los Angeles. But to supply those 10 million people with water a fair percent of the watershed of California is tapped. If 1 million people moved into the all that mostly empty land between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, where are they going to get water?"
We're suffering from a shortage of technological hubris right now. Put someone like Kurzweil in charge of the California water system, and Los Angeles sucking Wyoming dry would quickly be replaced by desalination.
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It is all over the news that 99% of the water used^H^H^H^H wasted is used in agriculture, e.g. Almond farms.
86% of all Almonds come from the US, destroying e.g. Spanish Almond farmers who can not switch to machine based harvesting. Why? What is so fucking important if a bag of Almonds costs 99cents or $1,49, so the rest of the world can also have a living on it?
Most of the Almonds are grown in California, every year adding another 10,000 acres of production.
But we all know that either global warming or El N
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The California water shortage is primarily due to increasing population, which turns a cycle of dry years into a crisis.
When problems like this crop up liberals wring their hands and preach for a return to their beloved Stone Age. Let scientists characterize the problem, and let engineers fix it.
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The California water shortage is primarily due to increasing population, which turns a cycle of dry years into a crisis.
No it is not.
It is primary due to insane water consumption by Almond farms. And secondary to all other farming.
I suggest to google for it, can't be so hard.
Human beings don't need much water, actually a no brainer. You could increase the population of California by a factor of 100 and the change in water "waste" would not even show on the demand curve.
Re:Ninety-nine percent of the land is not used... (Score:5, Interesting)
10 million people live in, say, around Los Angeles. But to supply those 10 million people with water a fair percent of the watershed of California is tapped.
Yes, and that is especially wrong because it is unnecessary. Believe it or not, Los Angeles receives enough rainfall to account for more than 90% of its water use. But about 99% of that water runs straight into the ocean (where it causes brackishness during rains, because so much water is shed so quickly!) because Los Angeles has been paved all to hell, and has no ability to retain water. It's like a runner that's skipping salt.
In, say, parts of New York of the south, water is more abundant. But to feed 10 million people anywhere takes land to grow food, to find a place to dispose of their sewage and trash, etc. etc.
Sewage is a big issue. At best you need enough room to compost the poop, and since nobody here wants to be a night soil man we have a whole expensive infrastructure for piping the shit around... using water. A lot of water. And then, the water is maybe used for irrigation. But we could at least be using AIWPS [sdsu.edu] and getting clean water out of the other end of the system, albeit at some cost in space. Which brings us back to what you were saying, of course.
Food is actually a much smaller issue. Vertical gardening on aeroponics can produce a whole lot of produce in a very small space with very little resources. There are dozens if not hundreds of such operations across the country so far, and they are reproducing rapidly.
Trash is a huge issue, but it should be a lot smaller. Notably, all packaging should be recyclable, and what isn't recyclable should be compostable. It should be outright illegal to sell anything that comes in a non-recyclable package. That would go a long way towards solving this problem.
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Can sterilized packaging only be made from non-recyclable plastics?
A quick google showed me that polypropylene is autoclaveable [labmanager.com], so the short answer is no
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So, using your worst case, we get a circle 200-odd miles in radius around LA to provide for LA. Less than half that using your best case.
Note that your best case number (two acres per head) is a more realistic number for the most part....
Nah (Score:3)
Just ignore the biggest problems (oil dependence and climate change), concentrate on everything else, and say it all looks good! ...).
Technology needs an imperial fuckton of energy (mostly from oil, gas and coal) for sometimes dubious results that don't do much, if anything, to improve our quality of life (Pokemon Go, Bitcoins,
Let's not forget that technology isn't science, and that we shouldn't do everything just because we can.
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One of the nicer things about climate change is I can look forward to everyone in Florida having conversion moments when Miami is under water.
Of course, what they do after that is one of the worst things about climate change.
Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
"A century ago, there would be a battle that wiped out the next village, you'd never even hear about it."
Huh? Maybe in the remote parts of Africa or some other place that was still stuck in the stone age. Maybe. In the parts of the worlds actually living in the (early) 20th century not so much.
""We're only crowded because we've crowded ourselves into cities. Try taking a train trip across the United States, or Europe or Asia or anywhere in the world. Ninety-nine percent of the land is not used... we don't want to use it because you don't want to be out in the boondocks if you don't have people to work and play with. That's already changing now that we have some level of virtual communication..."
Not in the US, or most of Europe, or a good chunk of Asia. Not used for housing or urban sprawl isn't the same as not used. And no, it's actually changing much - communication isn't the only issue, access to stuff (physical goods) is also important, as is access to experiences. And neither have markedly changed if you live in the actual boondocks. (I find most people who live in big cities have little idea what conditions are like outside of the metro area.)
When will computer geeks grasp that most of the human race actually enjoys the company of others and that there are actual economic reasons why people cluster?
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"A century ago, there would be a battle that wiped out the next village, you'd never even hear about it."
Huh? Maybe in the remote parts of Africa or some other place that was still stuck in the stone age. Maybe. In the parts of the worlds actually living in the (early) 20th century not so much.
Just to add to that, a century ago, about 30% of the people in the US had telephones and the first coast to cost long distance call was made. Intercontinental telegraph lines already connected North America, South America and Europe. In many cities, theaters showed hour-long newsreels [wsj.com] during the day (commercial TV stations wouldn't show up for another 15 years or so). Newspapers and radio were everyday sources of information for everyone.
Also, a century ago was 1916. WWI was in full swing. There were mi
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"A century ago, there would be a battle that wiped out the next village, you'd never even hear about it."
Huh? Maybe in the remote parts of Africa or some other place that was still stuck in the stone age. Maybe. In the parts of the worlds actually living in the (early) 20th century not so much.
I think there's some truth to this, in that not even that long ago when something awful happened far away it may have gotten printed in a larger newspaper but even then the details were spartan, often delayed by days or weeks (depending on how far back we're talking).
But now? We get to watch high definition video of the something awful happening in almost real time and within hours we have a mountain of data on it, from facts to photos to additional video, from the other side of the world.
The benefit of no
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Exactly! Living in a large metropolis of a low population state, I hadn't appreciated how very little land is not used for some purpose until moving to the country. Any apparently unused land just lacks economic value. I appreciated from a few years of working for this state's water supply utility that all regularly flowing surface water streams had been dammed for water. There were no naturally flowing water courses unless water flow was so infrequent as to make it uneconomic to dam the stream...
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My wife had a foggy dream of being self-sustaining. I wasn't interested in being a farmer. She gave up on the idea very quickly.
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My wife had a foggy dream of being self-sustaining. I wasn't interested in being a farmer. She gave up on the idea very quickly.
The robotic revolution is finally at hand. Food production is going to become a job for robots like everything else. The problem isn't going to be where food comes from, it's going to be whether the elites let you have any.
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There was an old British sitcom, The Good Life, about a couple who tried to go self-sustaining. It's really very funny, you should watch it.
The final episode was unusual. Most of the series was very upbeat - the Good's faced up to all the problems that came their way, fighting for their dream with ingenuity and determination. They turned their garden into a miniature farm, made contacts to barter their excess production for what they couldn't make, and learned many new skills - until the last episode, when
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growing food for even one person to eat year-round requires an enormous amount of space.
And by "enormous amount of space", you mean something like two hundred square meters for your annual carbohydrate needs? Modern agriculture is insanely space-efficient. Now of course food is more than just about grain, but the UN calculates with a square 70 meters in size even for western-style diet. But maybe a good start for the western population would be stopping throwing half of the produced food into garbage before it even gets into our stomachs?
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Good idea. We should implement a Year Zero Policy for geeks. Force them to do manual labor for some time. Make that one year at the very least. They will either die or emerge as more decent persons. Either outcome is good.
Your exact idea has been tried. This is how it turned out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Umm (Score:2, Insightful)
'A century ago, there would be a battle that wiped out the next village, you'd never even hear about it'.
In 1916? Really? World War I aside, anywhere you'd have heard about it in 1916 I suspect you would today. It wasn't the Middle Ages.
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12 comments deep before I find one that isn't some idiot's snark.
He is just re-making an old observation here, that instant worldwide communication (and now, camera videos) make the entire world a place of disaster observation. Heck, any old incident for that matter.
Tornado, hurricane, murder, car accident, train accident, these were incredibly rare in the days of old film cameras. Few had one, and never at the ready.
Now these scenes are not just common, but daily. We have an entire world of rare events
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You moved the goalposts. *He* said "A century ago, there would be a battle that wiped out the next village, you'd never even hear about it.". The 'you' in there doesn't refer to the world but the next village over.
What's wrong in the world. (Score:2, Troll)
We get information about the world wide slide of the west into a dystopia, where every single country is passing more laws designed to 'keep us safe' which roughly translates to 'give politicians more power to control us'. You can almost see the politicians high fiving each other in the background as they deceive us with some new outrageous lie.
We get information about how world wide mega corporations suction the wealth of nations into their ever increasing profit books while introducing 6000 page monolit
Commuciation doesn't solve the logistics (Score:5, Interesting)
People don't just live in the cities because they want to be around other people for work and play, cities are also handy in that all sorts of crucial services are nearby. There's a reason cities developed as trade hubs to begin with: people are lazy and would rather walk a couple hundred meters and take a subway to go fetch their laptop from the shop rather than driving long distances for it. Likewise, being close to emergency services is something that only cities can offer. Here in Finland the average response time of an ambulance in cities is about 8-10 minutes in emergencies, whereas up north in Lapland it can easily be an hour even with a helicopter. Libraries, schools, hospitals, post offices, drug stores, etc, all of these and much more are something you can find in nearly every part of any larger city but you might have to travel a couple hundred miles to out in the countryside.
I'm not saying Ray's wrong overall: it's true that living out of cities has become more viable with technology, but it's a bit shortsighted to assume that the only reason people are concentrated into cities are social reasons and entirely ignore the benefits provided by the kind of service infrastructure that cities offer and sparsely populated areas do not.
"Ninety-nine percent of the land is not used"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds like nonsense; just because there aren't houses on it doesn't mean it's unused. There's a lot of farmland in, for example, central North America, or outside the larger European cities.
Also, forests, for example, might be called "unused" by some, but I'd argue that they are useful just as they are and if we raze them all for farmland and housing we'd be in a bad way.
For example, forests are repositories for all kinds of specialized DNA (refererring now to the 2nd quote in TFS), and to stretch the DNA-is-code analogy, it's rarely a good idea to discard forever any when storage is cheap.
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Forests continuously produce oxygen for us - and other living creatures - to consume. Even if you don't interact directly with them, it doesn't mean they're not important. To continue the softwareanalogy, they're a vital part of Earth's "operating system".
"Futurist" = "Idiot in residence" (Score:2)
Kurzweil ist a stellar example for that. He is also wrong, 100 years ago, Newspapers were rare and expensive, but they did report all the things that mattered. At that time, the idea was already several centuries old (on paper).
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Kurzweil ist a stellar example for that. He is also wrong, 100 years ago, Newspapers were rare and expensive, but they did report all the things that mattered. At that time, the idea was already several centuries old (on paper).
This is the problem with having a plutocracy. You have to make up lots of bullshit jobs for all the kids-of-someone-rich who didn't win at the talent lottery.
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No they weren't. The price of a newspaper in 1915 was $.05 for Sunday. Today, the NYT costs $5 for Sunday. Adjusting $.05 from 1915 gives $1.17 today. So the cost of newspapers has risen dramatically from then.
Two hundred years ago they were more rare but still available to anyone in a decent sized city.
You were also right. They carried a great deal of news. Spanish-American War (1898) anyone? Reporters (Hemingway) on the field. Same for the B
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Maybe he writes from an Amarican POV (Score:4, Interesting)
> ry taking a train trip across the United States, or Europe or Asia or anywhere in the world. Ninety-nine percent of the land is not used... we don't want to use it because you don't want to be out in the boondocks if you don't have people to work and play with.
Hah, try that in most of Europe: building a house in an area not appointed to housing even if you own the land. The police will be very quickly to tell you that is not allowed and if you don't remove the building yourself the state will do it for you and send you the bill (unless you are very rich and influential). In The Netherlands there is even hassle about people owning vacation houses who live there permanantly (which is not allowed but sometimes ignored by the local authorities).
Many people here have no choice but to live in a city.
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Wow - Europe is even more oppressive than I realized.
Try being one of the people whose house burned down in for example the Valley Fire, which occurred in Lake County, CA. First, the permit process is taking around a year. Second, permits for a single-bedroom dwelling are $30,000 and they go up from there, and you have to fully repermit if there are no plans on file. There aren't for most of them, because most of them are remodeled hunting cabins. Third, a lot of these places can't be permitted for a leachfield under current laws because of the size of the lo
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There are similar reasons for such restrictions in Europe. Point here was that US is not that different from Europe in regards to building rights, not that we should be able to build anything anywhere.
In my area, there is a limit of height of buildings, because it is on landing path for local airport. One of buildings there is 5 meters too high and they got order from local county that they need to dismantle two top floors (and it is multi family, condo building). People are already living there, paid for a
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Wow - Europe is even more oppressive than I realized.
"Even more". lol
The World's Getting Worse (Score:3)
"...there's a general perception that the world's getting worse..."
Well, yeah, amongst people lacking any historical perspective. And maybe amongst politicians, although I'm not always certain they actually believe what they're demagoguing about. I mean, there are people - many people - who think that crime is worse today, when it's actually at record lows. Whether it's you, me, or Kurzweil saying it, these people's minds won't be changed. Let's face it, most people are not all that educated, and get most of their knowledge about the World through the television.
Ninety-nine percent of the land is not used ??? (Score:2)
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People get old, you know.
The man is rapidly becoming a parody of whatever it was he once accomplished.
Most land is used. (Score:3)
Almost all land in Europe is used, but it's not settled.
It takes about 60 years for a forest to grow, farming is needed for food and interim areas are needed for plants to prosper.
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Almost all land in Europe is used,
Actually it is not.
Starting with the lands that can not be "used" except for hunting like mountains, 30% of Europe are nature reservations. Probably it is even more.
Meanwhile we have interconnected natural preservation zones ging from Spain via France up to Poland. It is just a lot of small areas, but the goal is to have a patchwork of interconnected natural preservation regions that stretch over all of the EU.
On the other hand: most woods you see when drive through them
What? 99% of land not used? (Score:5, Informative)
Farming every tiny itsy bitsy pieces of flat ground, herding goats and cows in the slopes strewn with rock, making one wonder what do these goats eat? rocks? There are no untouched pieces of virgin forests left in India. Not in significant quantities.
Really bad timing for flat earther shit (Score:2)
Considering that exactly a century ago those battles were actually happening (Poziers etc) and were reported on the opposite side of the world on the same day it's really bad and insensitive timing for that "grandpa was a flat earther" shit.
Other things - "99% of the land" - the guy may have stuff worth listening to but he's wrapping it up in utterly ridiculous bullshit.
News? Interesting? (Score:2)
Not so much.
I'm not sure why a futurist telling us the obvious is worth posting?
Illusion (Score:2)
This sounds like the perspective of a city dweller. In the US at least, unless you are going out west and talking about desert the land is actually much more populated than even 20 years ago. More and more it's becoming like most state/national parks, a thin screen of trees creating the illusion of being
It's a shame about Ray (Score:2)
Kurzweil is getting worse. He wants to be taken seriously, but then he says things like "99% of land is not used". That's pretty fucking stupid, Ray.
Couple of years ago he said all you need to make a brain is the few bytes you find in the DNA. Uhhh... No, Ray. Embryology. The brain has to interact with a real environment in order to develop. So it takes waaaaaaaaaay more information than the DNA code itself.
I've no doubt he is/was a smart guy but he keeps talking shit.
Overweening ARROGANCE! (Score:2)
..and most importantly to reprogram this outdated software..
You stupid son of a bitch, we are not anywhere near the point, knowledge-wise, and especially wisdom-wise, to 'edit' our own genomic 'software'. Some of you make jokes about a zombie apocalypse? This is the arrogant mindset that will bring about the equivalent of that! GMO foods are bad enough: I don't even say anything about them anymore because the horse has already left the barn: it's out in the wild now, literally in the wind, and nothing can ever change that. Screwing with our own DNA on the level he
Re: Who is Kurzweil? Why should I care? (Score:5, Informative)
Google's Director of Engineering, inventor of optical character recognition, inventor of the digital music keyboard and lots of other stuff - his Wikipedia page is quite lengthy...
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I'm glad there are still people who think like this, especially in California.
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Re: Who is Kurzweil? Why should I care? (Score:4, Informative)
For instance:
So, it's been around too long for him. What we appear to have with crediting Kurzweil with inventing OCR is a moving of goal posts to accommodate his tech instead of the fundamental idea and implementation.
A search on "OCR inventor" yields the name Emanuel Goldberg as the inventor of Optical Character Recognition (1931).
So Kurzweil moved it into a more modern computer, he didn't invent OCR per se.
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Re: Who is Kurzweil? Why should I care? (Score:4, Interesting)
Kurzweil is not only a moron, his "accomplishments" are fake. Hint: Do not look up "Kurzweil", look up the things he claims to have invented. Just another fraudster living big because of stupid fanbois.
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That's probably because neural networks were crap when Kurzweil was working on OCR, so he didn't use them, so why would he be mentioned in a neural net textbook? Likewise, it's more likely than not that he didn't use machine learning either, at least not in a way that we're using it today (he quite possibly did some "traditional" model fitting, but if you include that in machine learning is up to you).
I think the problem here may lie in the fact that Kurzweil was one of those people who brought OCR into the
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Neural networks ARE machine learning.
No argument against that from me!
OCR IS Neural networks.
Now that is debatable. Or, you know, it actually isn't [history-computer.com] - there's no identity between the two. It's not even a case of one being a proper subset of the other, they merely intersect.
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Who are you to ask us that question?
Who are you, and why should we care?
What is the point, why are we here?
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It’s one of life’s great mysteries isn't it? Why are we here? I mean, are we the product of some cosmic coincidence? Or is there really a God watching everything, you know, with a plan for us and stuff. I don’t know, man, but it keeps me up at night.
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Re:Who is Kurzweil? Why should I care? (Score:5, Funny)
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Kurzweil's "we're all going to be immortal and the singularity will bring plenty to all" is: technology will let us make God and we will all go to techno-Heaven.
The terminator/golem scenario with the out-of-control superintelligences turning the whole world into computer material is: technology
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Indeed. These people want to believe something very much religion-like, bit are somehow smart enough to see how ridiculous traditional religion is. So they invented a surrogate that is not one bit better, but a bit less obvious.
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People want to live forever. Once they realise that the afterlife is a lie, they'll put their hopes in even a slim hope like technology that doesn't exist yet but may one day be possible, like uploading or cryonics.
Sure, the chances of waking up again after the dying an freezing is one in a million. But the chance of waking up from the crematorium is zero, so clutch at that straw and hope luck is on your side.
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So basically failed terror-management. Pathetic. Incidentally, we do know absolutely nothing about whether there is an "afterlife" or a next life waiting for us. We do know that some people use stories about one to defraud us (most religions, but also the Cryo-Freeze people and the "upload into computer" people and the like), but that does say nothing about the validity of the idea itself.
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Indeed. These people want to believe something very much religion-like, bit are somehow smart enough to see how ridiculous traditional religion is. So they invented a surrogate that is not one bit better, but a bit less obvious.
On one side you have wishful thinking, and on the other side you have people actually doing research to make things happen. Even if the promises of either side never pan out, one is quite a bit better than the other.
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There is a sucker born every minute...
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Re:Who is Kurzweil? Why should I care? (Score:4, Insightful)
He is a stellar example of an idiot with no understanding of science and a big ego. Kind of like a politician, but without the PR training and the power. As such he can be used as a negative example. I do not see any other use knowing about him would have.
Re:Who is Kurzweil? Why should I care? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, not believing the future he sees is another thing. I don't believe most of it, but he makes some good points. Do I believe in some unseen singularity that will merge man and machine and boom all will be good? No, just as I do not believe in a mystical sky being who's son's blood is wine.
But, his statement that while things seem worse, they are not is very true. We live in a society that thrives off of BAD news. It sells. And we can get it instantly. Even if there is less of it to report, it seems like there is more.
Do I think that AI and automation will surpass us one day? Yes. I do not think it will be in my lifetime, but it will happen. And, I have no predilection as to whether it will be a Butlerian Jihad moment or the saving of mankind. Why, because I know that it is impossible to see the future. Otherwise I would have my fusion powered flying car by now.
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Well, he does have a B.S. from MIT, the Grace Hopper Award, and the National Medal of Technology. So to say he is an idiot is more like ego stroking for you and not a true statement.
Obama has a Nobel peace prize, if you have a point then make it
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Oh, he didn't make it to more than a B.S.? Figures. The rest are political things, no reflection on skills or insights.
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It looks like you have written words, but I can find nothing intelligible in what you have said.
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Here is a hint: The problem is on your side. And it cannot be fixed.
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He's a frequent Slashdot contributor.
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Physicalism is about as scientifically sound as any other fundamentalist religion-type view. Its proponents claim to be anti-religion, but they are doing basically the same thing and with about as much scientifically sound evidence.
At this point Science does not have any insights into what consciousness, intelligence, intuition, etc. actually is. In particular for consciousness, there is simply no mechanism in Physics, but it looks more and more like intelligence on the level of a smart human being cannot a
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This statement:
Science does not have any insights into what consciousness, intelligence, intuition, etc. actually is.
Contradicts this one:
it looks more and more like intelligence on the level of a smart human being cannot actually be done with computing machinery in this universe either, not enough matter and energy available.
If we don't know what intelligence is, how can we know whether or not it's possible to create using computers? The very fact that our brains do not comprise more matter or energy than the universe is evidence that what you're saying can't possibly be true. You're basically putting forward the age-old "God of the gaps" argument, and it holds up just as much as it ever did. Just because we don't understand something now is not evidence that we'll never understand it.
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It does not. The problem is on your side and it is invalid assumption of truth of certain things that are most decidedly not proven to be true. Just like any other religious fundamentalist.
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At this point Science does not have any insights into what consciousness, intelligence, intuition, etc. actually is.
I'm curious if there are different types of consciousness. For instance aside from size, the difference between dolphin, elephant and, human brains and the way they work. Does that make for a different type of consciousness? Or is consciousness the same and awareness is what is different?
You look into the eyes of an animal and you can see a conscious awareness. Apart from wanting food, sex and sleep what else is going on in those consciousnesses? A fast constantly aware consciousness of a dolphin whose br
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Physicalism is about as scientifically sound as any other fundamentalist religion-type view.
The view that the mind is what the brain does (materialism) is supported by evidence. Tons and tons of evidence. So.... you are wrong.
At this point Science does not have any insights into what consciousness, intelligence, intuition, etc. actually is. In particular for consciousness, there is simply no mechanism in Physics, but it looks more and more like intelligence on the level of a smart human being cannot actually be done with computing machinery in this universe either, not enough matter and energy available.
You seem to be arguing that there is something magical about the human brain. It is an information processing machine. It's a poorly understood one, but your claim that it is somehow impervious to physics is absurd.
It's possible to make a machine that does what the human brain does. Might be wetware, might be hardware, might just be software. We may not be smart enough to bui
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You wish. The evidence does say no such thing. Only if you to assume Physicalism first, then you can prove .... Physicalism! That is the same meaningless nonsense that any other religion does (and Physicalism taken as truth is nothing but religion).
How fast is a brain? How fast is a computer? (Score:2)
Well, it takes about 40 seconds for a supercomputer to perform the same number of computations a human brain does in one - a giant waste of computing power, but it's actually been done.
Interesting datum, but, at the moment we don't even know what the brain is doing with its computing power.
Let's check the calculation. The brain had 100 billion neurons, each with an average of 7,000 synapses, so that's 700 trillion synapses. Each neuron fires at a rate on the order of 1/7 Hz (close enough), so that's 100 trillion synapse firings per second. The fastest supercomputer is a little under 100 petaflops, so the fastest supercomputer does 1000 floating point operations for every neuron firing i
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No intelligible information in your pile of gibberish, either.
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I automatically disregard anything he says. He desperately needs to learn some science before he spouts rubbish about it.
Why are all you people with gloom as your default setting not in Philadelphia right now with your comrades? This is a nerd forum. We're the people you despise until you need us to get something done.
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Mother Nature started the fight for survival, and now she wants to quit because she's losing?
- Charles Montgomery Burns
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