The Washington Nationals might have bitten off more than they can chew by naming William Howard Taft as their next racing mascot. If you aren’t familiar with the controversy, the baseball team features four mascots dressed as U.S. presidents that race around the Nationals’ stadium during home games to entertain fans.
“Teddy has handpicked the next president for the Presidents’ Race,” Nationals COO Andy Feffer told the newspaper on Friday, a day before the Taft mascot was rolled out. “There was a great amount of banter and discussion back and forth, but Teddy won out with his recommendation.”
On Saturday, the sanitized Taft mascot made its debut at a fan event, looking at least 100 pounds lighter than its real-life counterpart.
The reaction in the media, so far, is that even sportswriters who aren’t historians know the two men hated each other.
The Post’s Dan Steinberg asked a local historian how bad the blood was between TR and Taft.
Allan Lichtman, distinguished professor of history at American University, told Steinberg that each man considered the other a backstabber, and they had no qualms taking down each other in a presidential election.
“The rivalry was as bitter as it gets in politics,” said Lichtman. “There’s nothing like the feeling of betrayal, and both men felt betrayed by the other.”
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
That's exactly what the summary said.
And that's why it's so awesome. The Teabaggers eating their own. What could be better?
Absolutely nothing. The last time I ever saw a bunch of wingnuts fighting among themselves like this was in the bad old days of the New Left, when SDS split into the PL, RYM2 and Weathermen factions, each one trying to leapfrog over the others in ratcheting up their pidgin revolutionary rhetoric.
The similarities between those "revolutionary" factions of the New Left and the Mark Levin wing of the wingnut Right are far more noticeable than their differences. They both saw "the government" as the oppressor, they were both always hunting down RINOs**, and they both were infatuated with guns as a means of resistance.
**either the Revolutionary or Republican versions of the beast
How could an entity like the Daily Caller prevent such wanton abuse by dirty liberal leaders-on like Bob Woodward, telling them lies? They're duty bound to publish anything they're told, after all. I mean, just ask Ben Shapiro. If someone tells you something, you publish it. It's not like there's a profession where people go out and ask questions about things they've been told, investigate the veracity of those claims and frame disparate claims in relation to some sort of factual reality, right? That's crazy. You can't expect the Daily Caller to go to those lengths. For god's sake, they're *journalists.*
I'll take "Useless Pieces of Crap I Worked With in Little Rock" for $100, Alex.
Is Sarah Palin going to become her generation's Bob Avakian?
Now, now. They're not duty-bound to publish ANYTHING they're told. Only those things that, as "explained" by Matt Lewis, fit their frantic narrative:
Journalism is all about confirming suspicions, ya know. Factual reality is for the lamestream.
Is Sarah Palin going to become her generation's Bob Avakian?
Kathleen Cleaver, maybe, or better yet, the hippie woman you used to see on the cover of a hundred underground newspapers, with a baby in one arm and a rifle slung over her other shoulder, just daring the government to try to take either of them away.
One of the funniest moments of that entire era was the time Bernardine Dohrn decked herself out in a tight miniskirt up to her thong line and started to deliver a speech on women's liberation to a group of mostly Republican men at the then 100% male Georgetown University. Of course the second she started shimmying onto the stage, the wolf whistles started coming right and left. And naturally her response was to start denouncing all those male chauvinist pigs who were brazenly objectifying her.
The part about objectifying her was clearly true, but back then she was like about a 9.5 on a 10 scale, and you had to wonder what the hell she was expecting. I guess it may have been something that she knew was going to happen, and that she was cleverly planning to use as a horror story to bring more women to the cause, but if that was the case, she did a hell of a good job at faking all that indignation.
¹ Well, a good start, I mean.
Sure. I was responding to the claim by sdeb that Kurzweil was a 'kook'. You also posted no specifics. I then wrote,
I don't know how to get you to read what I actually wrote.
Try troubling yourself to understand the argument. Once we control evolution, then the principle of natural selection is obsolete. I can't put it any more clearly than that, and the context in which I wrote it was natural selection.
Right--which is why I was writing within a specific context: Natural selection.
Include one or more facts, or at least do some of the basic reading, and earn yourself an opinion.
Well, clearly you don't. The first article you link to is on the order of criticizing someone for not doing something they're clearly not interested in doing, and which has no genuinely meaningful relationship to their work. I'll assume the second link was to the second thing you googled.
Gee, ya reckon? A friend of mine who was interviewed on that PBS special on the women's movement the other night wrote an entire book on the effect that male chauvinism within the civil rights and anti-war movement had on spurring the feminist movement of the 60's and 70's.
For the Hayekian Galtiliers, I suppose... but it's proven to be a surprisingly unpopular thing for the other 85% of society.
It's a deliciously amusing thing though, because that 'good thing'?
Well, David, your party is going full tilt (the "Obamaquester") putting it in Obama's hands.... so... will you be needing the WH mailing address to send Obama a thank you card for "his" sequester?
Yes, blatantly inviting being made into an object, and then when it comes to pass, as the day the night, going into a righteous harangue--that's almost as funny as those whiny guys having to pay child support for a child they were shanghaied into being the father of.
Well, if you can get an outcome that you like, that infuriates 85% of the population AND blame it on your enemy, why wouldn't you?
Right, which is why no one said it, unless we're taking remarks completely out of context just for sh!ts and giggles.
It's not difficult: Once natural selection ceases to operate--once we control our evolution--Darwin's theory of natural selection as it applies to us and dictates the course of our evolution, is obsolete.
Reposting from 422:
One of the interesting things about the discussion is that there ARE relevant criticisms of Kurzweil's work in what I linked to on the last page, and I mentioned those criticisms of his work in post 425, but through post 460 no one else has made a specific criticism of Kurzweil's work, or of the concept of a technological singularity, or of high-fidelity downloadable brain emulators, the likeliest form near-term immortality will take, or....
And as soon as you offer a legitimate criticism, we might actually be able to discuss your objections to his work. So far, throug 460, though, there are a half dozen claims of nuttery, and not a single specific, or a single fact. You guys should be able to do better.
What is something specific that Kurzweil has said pertinent to the discussion of immortality, or emulators, or the singularity that you disagree with?
Sure - I'm just saying send a thank you card -- unsigned, of course -- afterwards.
Whether Darwin is obsolete, humanity is doomed, or whatever -- come now, we are not barbarians!
Does anyone know what 'unprivileged physical contact' is, or why, when it does not result in harm or injury, it should be a 'misdemeanor crime'?
This is fucking awesome.
----------------
edit:
Jay, I'm not sure what your point is (though, ouch, re Morty's consciousness. Poor guy--he can process 10 to the 21st floating point operations per second and people still trash talk him. That is one cold universe). Processing power that costs 70 cents in 2013 cost $33,000,000 in 1984. If there's one thing we know, the cost of computing power plummets. If Morty can't afford 12 versions of him Self in 2045, he will in 2075. In any case, the issues of dealing with multiple identities and matters of charity remain, whether there are 20 or 20 million people dealing with it.
Humans already control natural selection in themselves and various plant and animal cultivars, and have for 10,000 years. Although of course the ability and will to control natural selection was, in fact, selected for -- so it's turtles all the way down.
I still say my airplane analogy is apt. APT!.
If DMN is "good" for one thing, it's not just an utter inability to see things the way most people see things, it's how he writes as if the concept that perhaps people see things differently never occurs to him.
Post 516 is a great example, it's what Artie Ziff would have written if Ziff wrote on political blogs.
this is like a sentence from some alternative universe- Frum is talking about how some members of his own party are trying to "blame" (or credit") Obama for the sequester- it is pretty much a fact that some are doing that.
DMN then thinks it's odd that Frum would even think that some people want to give Obama "credit" but it's DMN's query that is truly odd- people are trying to give Obama "credit" (and Obama is strenuously trying to give others the same "credit")- so people are doing that-
as to being not clear, DMN writes as if he is truly oblivious to the fact that the sequester is [currently] unpopular-
and playing it as a straight man- is he oblivious, or is he merely attempting to be dryly humorous?
If DMN is "good" for one thing, it's not just an utter inability to see things the way most people see things, it's how he writes as if the concept that perhaps people see things differently never occurs to him.
Post 516 is a great example, it's what Artie Ziff would have written if Ziff wrote on political blogs.
this is like a sentence from some alternative universe- Frum is talking about how some members of his own party are trying to "blame" (or credit") Obama for the sequester- it is pretty much a fact that some are doing that.
DMN then thinks it's odd that Frum would even think that some people want to give Obama "credit" but it's DMN's query that is truly odd- people are trying to give Obama "credit" (and Obama is strenuously trying to give others the same "credit")- so people are doing that-
as to being not clear, DMN writes as if he is truly oblivious to the fact that the sequester is [currently] unpopular-
and playing it as a straight man- is he oblivious, or is he merely attempting to be dryly humorous?
You did manage to say something interesting here, though. Inapt, but revealing. There is a fundamental change, once we began to understand and play directly with DNA, in how evolution happens. That discovery and intervention is literally unprecedented, and your comparison to the past 10,000 years as though at most what we're doing is upping the ante a little is simply a failure of imagination.
The apt comparison of the last 10,000 years to the era begun with Crick and Watson et al and including petaflop computers along with sequencing the genome is of the bicycle to manned, supraorbital spacecraft.
It's fascinating to see people even on a site like this stuck in the same old thinking. It's called exponential growth for a reason, and the failure to grasp that it's nothing like the linear growth that is a fair description of much of human progress accounts for a lot of the inability to see where we're headed.
edit: here and there
and playing it as a straight man- is he oblivious, or is he merely attempting to be dryly humorous?
Since I put DMN on ignore, I don't have to wonder any more. The signal-to-noise ratio in these threads has noticeably improved for me.
I'm skeptical that computing speed's exponential growth can continue indefinitely. As with most examples of exponential growth, there are physical limits -- Planck's constant, atomic scales, the speed of light, etc. -- that will take effect at some point. Quantum computing looks to be only a piece of the answer.
Yet you trash that ratio for others. What's your record for consecutive posts in this threads without referring to people you don't like as stupid? 4?
hmm someone no longer has someone on ignore....
GS, when I click on your link, I get a "forbidden" window come up.
But natural selection will always be with us, even if germline manipulation is permitted. All that will happen is the genetic drift will have more external factors impacting on it.
And humans will never, and I mean NEVER, have absolute control of every factor that can impact natural selection. NEVER.
To say otherwise means you don't really understand what evolution by natural selection really means, and how it happens.
I don't have him on ignore but you are right about the signal to noise ratio. Now that he's a father, it seems he can't post as much and the quality of the threads has noticeably improved.
Sara Evans and Charlotte Bunch (who was also interviewed for that same PBS show) were the co-chairs of the Duke YWCA when I was there. She met her first husband (Harry Boyte, my best friend at Duke) on the Selma-Montgomery march, and I used to stay with them when I was book scouting in Minneapolis. She's now re-married and living in South Carolina. One of the truly fine people I've ever known and a great influence to several generations of her students at UM (meaning Minnesota, not Michigan) and elsewhere.
Personal Politics, which Sara wrote in her early 30's, is one of the underrated first hand sources on the origins of the modern women's movement. For anyone with eyes and ears, it didn't take a genius to figure out that there was bound to be a big backlash against the subordinate roles that most women were consigned to in the civil rights** and anti-war movements, and Sara was there taking it all down when those memories were still fresh.
**Though a significant percentage of the local leaders in the civil rights movement were women: Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Gray, Gloria Richardson, etc.
goose, you can't just stop there. Delight us with anecdotes.
And I think you will find this article interesting, as it appears to validate your impression re:the bowtied fratboy.
Tucker Carlson’s downward spiral
Also, the sequester can't be unpopular since it hasn't had any effect yet; what's unpopular is the scare tactics being announced by Obama and reported uncritically by the liberal media, in which cutting an infinitesimal portion of the federal budget, will somehow cut every popular program but nothing unpopular. It's the standard politician trick of closing parks and firehouses in a budget 'crisis,' rather than, say, ATF agents and inspectors.
Morty--I'm sure I don't know Dawkins as well as you do--is The Selfish Gene the best place to start getting better acquainted?
Speaking of 'basic character' and 'moralistic terms,' there are a variety of possible ways morality might develop. One of the better papers on the subject is a recent one "The Superintelligent Will: motivation and instrumental rationality in advanced artificial agents" by Nick Bostrom, from the Future of Humanity Institute Faculty of Philosophy & Oxford Martin School, at Oxford University.
I've been thinking about both the path to and substrate of our eventual immortality and how our immortality might develop in tandem with the advanced agents that help generate it. Those agents might provide a template for how we can anticipate our morality might evolve. We might very quickly have to deal with the issues an independently developed superintelligence would (while, I hope, integrating the best of our current, embedded selves). Those superintelligent agents are useful points of conjecture because in short order, once we develop high fidelity brain emulators that allow for downloading, we'll have means in common with them, if not yet the abilities.
Anyway, Bostrom is a good, straightforward read. He makes the useful point that the different sources of our advanced agents yield different outcomes.
Btw, Bostrom's Abstract is interesting in and of itself.
A nice-sized step towards the above is getting significant investment:
"KOOKS GET FUNDING." Oh, wait, maybe it's "QUEST TO MODEL THE HUMAN BRAIN NETS A BILLION EUROS"
Further down TFA says,
There have been a number of breakthroughs in the last few years that guarantee we'll reach exascale computing (essential to the brain project) by the end of the decade (and possibly as early as 2017). From Electrical Engineering:
One example of what exascale computing can do is read high definition MRIs in real time, which would give us unprecedented views of dynamic processes in the brain. Another example is the vastly improved modeling of global warming. The problem of the speed of light mentioned upthread as a limitation in computing is in part overcome by using light to transmit information. The recently developed nanophotonic chips are keys to a number of versions of exascale computing.
Yes, that book or, depending on your state of scientific knowledge, The Blind Watchmaker. Both are excellent reads. No one is better at summing up evidence and explaining biology and its implications. He's a vivid stylist. His mode of argument is usually framed by using extended comparison. The Selfish Gene, in an appendix essay, was where he first mooted his speculations on the meme.
Pretty sure that's not true. Things yet to happen can be popular or unpopular. Logically, you might argue that the popularity or otherwise of those things might be misleading, since the 'true' effects are yet to be known, but that's hardly the same thing.
The Selfish Gene is more technical; The Blind Watchmaker more accessible if like me you hadn't swotted up on science in a few decades. TBW has probably served as a basic starting text for some philosophers of science (like Dennett), so it's more thrilling for people like us who like to opinionate at will. You sound like you're more advanced than I was at the beginning stage when I decided to do some catching up, so I'd start with the first one, The Selfish Gene. It's also a true literary feat, a brilliant exercise in argument by extended conceit (no, he doesn't just rely on that--he uses it to make his points clear to the reasonably educated and informed reader.
EDIT: And if you are interested in evolution and Darwin's theories and views on evolution, DAwkins's The Greatest Show on Earth has been called the best popular presentation, although Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True (he keeps it as simple as his title) is very good and very quick (it's about 130 pages long).
Haven't read the latter, but Greatest Show on Earth is what I would recommend for people who are borderline under the sway of the religious dogma, but still have a moderately open mind(I know mostly an oxymoron there) It's a great introduction to evolution book.
And Dawkins can be read for his science, isolating his religious opinions to one side (except for something like The God Delusion of course).
Or would be, if manned supraorbital spacecraft were still with us and not an abandoned venture from 40 years ago :)
If I learned anything from watching Jurassic Park about 100 times when my son was eight years old, it's that humans can indeed exert artificial selection on organisms (indeed Darwin and Wallace were led to conceptualize natural selection by observing artificial selection), and yes, even to design genomes – but as Publicola notes, these designer organisms are still going to have to live in a system with almost infinite numbers and permutations of variables way beyond human control. It's not flat-earth thinking to point that out; it seems to me just an acknowledgment of reality. Feral animals, weeds, and invasive species of all kinds seem to be the way of human interventions in evolution, once vigilance is dropped for a moment (and it inevitably is).
On a beach vacation when my kids were about that age -- probably about six and eight -- I read much of the book aloud to them. They were completely into it. Good times.
When Dennis Rodman replacing your current leader would be met with massive worldwide relief and support, you know there's a problem with your country.
That's a good point. I guess I could research it, to go into it more intelligently, but for right now, let me just comment that I think Darwinists like Dawkins would say that our culture not only represents the culmination of what began as biology but becomes part of that changing environment the organism is selected for in the long run. What makes prognostications along these lines chancey is that we don't have a very long run here, so it's hard to discern. But, I don't see why Singularity (or whatever) wouldn't be incorporated in natural selection. Surely some of those downloads will be more adatable than others? Maybe, as Dawkins rankly speculated in that appendix in The Selfish Gene, that's when memes, or something like that, becomes Darwinian. Dawkins and others have speculated that Darwin's theory (and other attributes of evolution) are not dependent on the particular life that we have here and now. If there's a different based life somewhere in the universe, chances are, they say, it evolved, or is evolving along Darwinian lines.
Biology, Biochemistry & Genetics on the other hand is just beginning it's exponential explosion (e.g, cost of DNA sequencing is currently Supra-moore's law).
And skeptical you/we should be. It seems extraordinarily unlikely it can continue indefinitely, for the reasons you mention, and more.** What I look at, though, are what appear to be the likeliest constraints, when those constraints are likely to kick in, and at what point those constraints interfere with significant progress, or with the particular topic under discussion.
Supercomputers currently run easily in the petaflop (10^15/second) range. The Cray Titan peaks at around 25 petaflops, or 25 quadrillion floating point operations per second. The Chinese have committed to a 100 petaflop computer by 2015. The tech for the next jump, to exascale (10^18/second) computing, is already well-understood. The chips necessary have already been built and tested. The process by which those chips will be assembled to work at that speed has no impediments, and the Chinese plan to reach the one exascale (one quintillion FLOPS) benchmark by 2018. The Indian government recently announced it will beat that by one year. That's another plus, that multiple nations and companies are working on supercomputers. The short term and therefore most reliable projections also mean that speed is projected to increase by a factor of 40 in five years.
No one is talking about a limit on the current architectures as less than 64 exaflops, so even the most conservative views don't picture things slowing down prior to getting within a few steps of the zettaflop computer (10^21/second, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second), which can more than handle most projected simulations of the human brain in real-time.
The occasional pessmistic view on how current supercomputer architectures might run dry around 64 exaflops doesn't take into account even small conceptual leaps, such as shrinking the length and width of current processors while using photolitho techniques to more than compensate by increasing the number of layers (thereby shortening the distance information needs to travel) on a chip to 32. It doesn't account for integrating memristors into supercomputers, or memristors as components of neuromorphic computer architecture, which could substantially reduce speeds required for strong AI or brain emulation.
Worst case, development can certainly slow below the trajectory described by Moore's law without significantly impeding the development of AI or brain emulators. If the doubling slowed significantly, occurring every four years, it's not really a big deal except for those of us likely to be among the last generation of humans suffering terminally from the currently irreversible disease of aging.
In short, I think the chances are fairly good that before Moore's law ceases to apply, we'll be matching or beating it for awhile. There's also a real wild card, in that some forms of (not necessarily strong) AI under development may well aid us in beating Moore's law.
------------------
Btw, fans of the xkcd comic strip who aren't familiar with its forums might get a kick out of the free floating discussions there. The second post at http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?t=22535&p=671338 gives some solid links to some of what are currently thought to be limiting values.
As for the ultimate "limits to computation", I'd like to be around for this:
Again, it's all relevant to what you want to accomplish. IF zettaflop computing is adequate to creating strong AI and is powerful enough to allow brain emulation, there don't seem to be any obvious constraints in the way of supercomputing continuing along the lines of Moore's law (well, House's corollary to Moore's law is more what we're talking about) and reaching zettaflop speeds.
A couple of years ago Eric Williams posted on foresight.org a nice summary of how we'll push past 64 exaflops (and on to zettaflops):
Once you have Strong AI functioning at the level of a single human brain, you're almost certainly within a decade of Strong AI functioning at a level one thousand times the smartest human brain (by gaining speed, if nothing else. Add improvements in software, and the contributions the AI is making towards its own development, and we're really taking off). It does cross my mind occasionally that this kind of radical, extrahuman development explains Fermi's Paradox. On the other hand, though, nonbiological intelligence would probably construct Dyson spheres and other energy sources necessary to megascaled supercomputing; we're already capable of detecting some Dyson spheres at some distances, so their absence suggests however slightly that the evolution of consciousness doesn't take a path of nonbiologic supercession with commensurate, unintelligible aims.
-----------------------
**I'm tabling for the moment things like Dyson spheres running megascale supercomputers, and the computation possible with evaporating black holes.
Remember that device that Dr. McCoy would wave over his patients to make a diagnosis of what was ailing them? That's no longer in the realm of inconceivable science fiction, except the device isn't waved. It's held for 20 minutes or so after a slide containing a drop or two of the patients blood is inserted into it.
@565: check out the "MIT Computer Program" thread. It'll be child's play to adapt the program as software for a handheld device that through a tiny video camera reads heart rate without touching the patient.
Btw, I've assumed the device McCoy is waving is a portable MRI (among other things), with real-time, high definition reading and diagnosis, natch. That means he's packing zettaflop power at least into a salt shaker.
Maybe yottaflop power (10^24) is more like it, since HD MRIs in real time are going to have to coexist in the device with a century or three of medical literature and expert diagnostic systems also accessible in real-time.
It has a miniature di-lithium crystal-powered battery in it :)
-Hand-held cell phones for sure.
-MRI and PET and other non-invasive imaging, though the machines are much larger.
-widescreen video
-extra-solar system space probes
Still waiting for the opportunity to travel back and forth in time and to shtup extra-terrestrial hotties though.
I assume you could regrow organs quickly in TOS (massive repairs were done from time to time), though I don't remember specific examples, and apparently there's now a push to be able to 3D-print organs from ones DNA. Aren't we close to some form of spray-on skin in order to make repairs? I remember something like that in the series. Though in 2013 what we have is presumably generic skin or more probably a skin-like substance, and not one that tailors itself to mimic your own skin's DNA the way it surely would in 2450ish.
In TNG they still couldn't fix poor Geordi's eyes though...
There's a skin patch in development that's made of the epidermal extracellular matrix that directs repopulation and repair through intrinsic cellular signals. Not quite the same thing.
That is on the list of X prizes.
If you have seen minority report, the Kinnect is making it possible for operating systems like the one used in that movie. Which dwarves the operating systems on The Next Generation.
In Star Trek IV they were on present day earth and McCoy gave someone a pill that regrew their kidney(?).
I thought it was cancer, which is why he's all aghast about somebody doing Chemo.
Yeah--I like Kurzweil precisely because he's willing to extend himself into areas he's not entirely expert in. We have to do that if we're going to aim at comprehensive theories of Being, but it also means we'll occasionally look like fools. The alternative is to theorize only narrowly, from subjects we've mastered.
I'm willing to cut real thinkers slack. In his Historium Animalum and Generatione Animalum Aristotle was variously of the opinion that "the female is, as it were, a mutilated male" and that "the female is more dispirited and more despondent than the male, more shameless and more lying, readier to deceive and possessing a better memory for grudges" and most famously that men had more teeth than women, but those don't mean I'm going to chuck the entirety of the Metaphysics. Where I'd diagnose kookery is in cases where someone is confronted with superior facts and persists in erroneous belief.
@571: are we going to carry around like the current medic alert bracelets small, locket-sized containers of our own stem cells that can be applied to any wound or used to repair any organ? That might be an intermediate step before medkits carry universal stem cells.
Btw, transporters seem kinda old hat. Instead you'd probably digitize your Self and send it at the speed of light (experiencing no time passing even if you send yourself 10,000 light years away) anywhere there was a receiver. You'd then have the option of downloading yourself into a handy android body*** more sensitive and durable than a human body (which, in 200 years, surely won't be much like the bodies we're in now), and take it from there. Whatever SETI looks for, I imagine one of the first things a civilization only slightly more advanced than ours will send out will be the consciousness of some of its members, and the instructions for the kit required to house those consciousnesses. Why send the ambassador's message when you can send the ambassador?
------------------------
Upthread there was reference to figuring how neurons work as essential to building brains. Developments in the field over the last few years have been extraordinary. In the wiki (tech guys have done a great job keeping wikipedia up to date on these things), under "Neuromophic", itself a good read:
Then, check out "singing neurons" and their individual voices at
www.frontiersin.org:
That's at: http://www.frontiersin.org/blog/The_Blue_Brain_Way_Creating_‘singing’_neurons_part_two_/191#sthash.PYXoau2J.dpuf
***If there's a civilization (including your own) capable of building receivers, surely a mobile android capable of serving as a repository for consciousness isn't too tough a task for it.
Why are we limited to only theorizing? We have at our disposal the scientific method, right? If Kurzweil wants to be taken seriously, he can construct a model and experiment to validate his theories. Then his critics can review and duplicate, if possible, his findings. Short of that, its all just mental masturbation.
If you break out the budget into general categories, there isn't a single area where cuts enjoy majority support, and there's only one area ("aid to world's needy" - a tiny item within the budget) where the cuts have even a plurality on their side.
What on earth are you talking about?.
First, theorizing about the future inherently means theorizing about untestable hypotheses. You're therefore asserting no one should theorize about anything that can't be currently tested, which is obviously absurd. Second, even if you only theorized about what was currently on the shelf, you'd move at the pace of ants if you yourself tested every single hypothesis you were offering. That's what people developing slightly better mosquito sprays do. It's never the way any thinker in any field theorizes. The people developing cpu's as short as five years out have to theorize an enormous number of currently untestable hypotheses. If you go ten and twenty and thirty years out, which there's obviously a great need to do, the number of hypotheses you make necessarily increases, and the number of untestable hypotheses correspondingly increases.
Third, stating what the fellow with numerous patents, inventions, and successful companies to his credit, and who has just been named Director of Engineering at Google should do if he "wants to be taken seriously" tells us either that you've stooped trolling or have literally no grasp of anything that's been done in AI and computing in the last twenty years. Please: just stop.
It's a strange review. The language is bizarre. "One this" and "one that" abounds. The anger and resentment is evident from the early going. That Kurzweil believes he's found the fundamental basis of intelligence is suspect because it's in a field where Kurzweil can 'manufacture something for a price'. But, don't "professional" philosophers offer theories "for a price", namely, their salaries? In their case, though, that's presumably a good thing. Here it garners the reviewer's suspicion.
The writer's main objection makes little sense. Kurzweil has not proposed that pattern recognition is the only function of mind, but the writer insists he has, and invents the following peculiar and irrelevant complaint.
A later objection, an extension of the above complaint, is simply a failure of reasoning:
"...there is no pattern recognition involved when I dream."
Sure there is. It's in part how you recognize faces and buildings within your dream. Pattern recognition is part of how the images (and emotions associated with them) arose and were retained in memory in the first place. It's likely that how you possess or carry or see the image involves one function of the brain, while another aspect of the brain recognizes that image. Alzeheimer's is quite obviously a disease wherein you routinely retain and carry the first part, the image, but fail to mantain the ability to recognize that image. Part of that failure involves a distintegration of the capacity for pattern recognition.
Kurzweil has to be correct in theorizing that pattern recognition is an essential component of intelligence. Additional issues are a) is pattern recognition not just essential but fundamental? b) is pursuing it as fundamental if it is not a costly diversion from a better path?
As for b), it needs to be explored, and even if it turns out to be a bit of a false lead, figuring out how it is and why it is could easily be a key step towards Strong AI.
In order to fabricate a criticism, though, McGinn takes the obvious hyperbole of the title and not only pushes it to an absurdity that has no relevance, but also pretends that perversion of the title's meaning should displace everything else Kurzweil writes. It's a pretty silly piece, and obviously so. And especially so when you get to around the fifth graf from the end of the first page where the best the writer can do is take metaphorical language literally. It's like criticizing Impressionist painting for "failing" to be realistic.
There's also an odd and unscucessful attempt at deconstructing the language of neuroscience and AI on the second page. What a mess. As the remarks on Wittgenstein demonstrate so clearly, Kurzweil's biggest sin is not talking about what the writer wants him to talk about. The last three paragraphs, rattling on about "law" as though Kurweil isn't using "law" colloquially, is a particular embarrassment.
Much more interesting is how Kurzweil might use his and Google's convergence of interests to develop intelligent algorithms based in part on what I call "deep" pattern recognition. (Structural linguists will know what I'm describing).
"Watson", IBM's Jeopardy-playing software, was successful at the narrow task its enormous resources were aimed at, but it evinced no intelligence. It did nudge information seeking programs ahead, and increased our ability to draw meaning out of certain, strictly defined phrases, but otherwise it wasn't meaningful towards creating Strong AI, any more than every chess-playing software ever developed was.
I do wonder, though, if in a decade you tie together the hundred most advanced expert systems in a hundred different fields, how much difference will there be between that combination of systems, and talking with a highly intelligent person? A great deal of effort will be made to make these expert systems user friendly. The expert system IBM developed out of the Watson program designed to help doctors make diagnoses is a billion-dollar market. The ease with which its output can be read will go a long way towards making it acceptable.
Still, none of that makes for Strong Artificial Intelligence, on the order of the way a human being with a minimal background in it might take an interest in astronomy and over several years (a few hours for a powerful computer) become expert in it.
Kurweil believes in the broadest sense that understanding and applying pattern recognition within language is the route towards creating machines that think; specifically, that we draw meaning out of the evidence we look at, and that meaning is found, in part, by both discerning patterns within evidence, and creating patterns in order to convey meaning. He's almost certainly partly right. He may not be quite as right as he thinks he is, but that's very different from being wrong.
To push much beyond where it is now, Google's search algorithms are going to have to develop the ability to draw meaning out of language by identifying patterns in advance, then applying those patterns to a given phrasing, and I don't doubt Kurzweil will be aiming at creating the kinds of algorithms that don't require software to be taught every possible, specific expression in order to draw out meaning and then respond to that meaning; then, to create meaning. .
In advance of high fidelity brain emulators allowing for downloading, I wonder how much information a human being would have to leave behind to have a shot at resurrection? Would, say, an hour of real time MRI, which might be possible by 2029, do it? Will you leave a copy of that along with instructions and enough cash to pay for the process's completion?.
One of the most interesting questions is, how will we even know when we develop Strong AI? What is the form of a Turing Test where we verify we have created a consciousness, as opposed to an entity merely asserting consciousness? That's a problem we may never completely solve.
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main