We evolved living in relatively small groups where everyone knew each other and exclusion from the group meant likely death. Now we are part of a global social web where at any time, any of our people may be occupied by other parts of their network that do not involve us. This risk of being abandoned instinctively feels like an existential threat, so we live with a constant underlying anxiety that we do not truly belong and are not really safe. It will be interesting to see whether this reality selects for individuals better equipped to cope with it, or whether we develop better systems to allow everyone to cope better... I'd guess a bit of both.
Readit NewsSimilarly I'll get something I order in a day or two even when it is the 5-7 business day option - it's in their interest to make everything as efficient as possible and not be holding onto inventory.
I think the main benefit is your orders get higher priority during holiday season when it's busy and regular orders may take a long time to fulfill.
rfugger commented on Words That Are Their Own Opposites (2015) mentalfloss.com/article/5... · Posted by u/artsandsci
Inflammable?
rfugger commented on FAA Finds New Risk on 737 Max, Orders Boeing to Make Changes bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/dboreham
I'd be pretty comfortable flying it after all this attention and review. It will probably be the best reviewed passenger plane software developed in America, if not the world once this is over.
Boeing deserves a 9-figure fine though, and its shareholders should lose massively to make sure this doesn't happen again.
rfugger commented on There is no general AI: Why Turing machines cannot pass the Turing test arxiv.org/abs/1906.05833... · Posted by u/sel1
Pardon my ignorance. Computers appear to be able to perform basic arithmetic. For example, you can open up the console in your browser and find that the sum of two and two is indeed four. So it is not entirely obvious to me how basic arithmetic is non-computable.
Gödel incompleteness applies to any system capable of basic arithmetic.
rfugger commented on There is no general AI: Why Turing machines cannot pass the Turing test arxiv.org/abs/1906.05833... · Posted by u/sel1
In another reply, I modified point three to be the assumption that all of the physical laws of the universe are defined by computable maths. I believe this is the case to the best of our knowledge, but please let me know if I'm wrong.
Unfortunately, restricting to only computable maths means disallowing the natural numbers, basic arithmetic, or any equivalent structure, since Gödel incompleteness would apply. I doubt any system without access to the full set of natural numbers or basic arithmetic could qualify as "general AI".
rfugger commented on There is no general AI: Why Turing machines cannot pass the Turing test arxiv.org/abs/1906.05833... · Posted by u/sel1
I am skeptical of any paper with this result, because several very plausible events would likely prove by example that computers can respond as a human would. It requires accepting certain assumption though.
1: Physicalism is true. Nothing exists that is not part of the physical world.
2: The physical world obeys mathematical laws, and those laws can be learned in time.
2.1: The physical contents of the human body can eventually be learned with arbitrary/sufficient fidelity.
3: Any mathematical rule can be computed by a sufficiently advanced computer. (Edit: or maybe a better assumption: the mathematical laws that underlie the universe are all computable.)
4: Computational power will continue to increase.
Subject to these assumptions, we will eventually gain the ability to simulate full physical human beings within computers. Perhaps with some amount of slowdown, but in the end, these simulated humans would be able to converse with entities outside the computer. In all likelihood, computers will pass the Turing test long before this. But if they don't, simulated humans seem like something that is certainly possible or even probable, and therefore the result of this paper is likely incorrect.
I think your premises are fair, but assumption #3 ("Any mathematical rule can be computed by a sufficiently advanced computer") is effectively ruled out by Gödel's incompleteness theorem[1] and/or the Church-Turing thesis[2].
The problem then becomes finding an approach to general AI that avoids hitting incompleteness/undecidability[3] issues. My feeling is that this would be difficult. One way to try to avoid these issues is to avoid notions of self-reference, since self-reference spawns a lot of undecidable stuff (eg, "this statement is false" is neither true nor false). It seems to me, though, that the notions of the self and self-awareness are central to human consciousness, and so unavoidable when developing a complete simulation of human consciousness. The self is probably not computable.
Obviously there could be approaches that avoid these pitfalls, but every year that goes by without much progress towards general AI makes me feel more confident in this intuition. I do think there will be lots of useful progress in specialized AIs, but I see this as analogous to developing algorithms to decide the halting problem for special classes of algorithms. General AI is a whole different beast.
But if general AI is physically impossible, how does the human brain "compute" general intelligence at all? It could be that your assumption #1 ("Physicalism is true. Nothing exists that is not part of the physical world.") is not correct. Maybe reality has "layers" and our world is some kind of simulation in another layer. Or maybe there is only one consciousness like many spiritual people and Boltzmann[4] suggest. Or maybe the human experience could be a process of trying to solve an undecidable problem and failing...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis
I am as democratic/left as it gets on most issues but I'd argue that its time to defund FEMA Insurance programs and let the private sector free market factor in the cost of impending destruction because of climate change. IMO that would put a hard dollar figure on the 'cost of doing nothing'. Which will (hopefully) translate into some kind or carbon taxes.
Or another alternative would be fund insurance through carbon tax dollars and return the rest as refund.
FEMA insurance could be to pay for relocation only.
rfugger commented on The Feds May Come to Regret Charging Assange with Espionage politico.com/magazine/sto... · Posted by u/matt4077
What evidence is there he’s a Russian asset?
He seems to have published no embarrassing or damaging information on Russia (at least in latter years?), and seemed willing to serve their purposes when it came to the 2016 election, by releasing hacked Democratic Party emails timed to do maximum damage to Hillary Clinton's campaign.
Prior to that, I had considered Wikileaks a brave experiment in radical transparency. Since then, I've considered Wikileaks a somewhat biased source. The truth is the truth, yes, but every truth is partial, and context matters.
"Asset" is perhaps too strong a word, but "useful idiot" may apply, or "the enemy of my enemy".
Homomorphic encryption promises a hidden and verifiable online voting system that does not rely on trusting third party.
https://www.chaum.com/publications/AccessibleVoterVerifiabil...
The major problem with online voting is that people can be coerced into voting against their wishes outside the watchful eye of election authorities. This may be worth the increase in voting ease, but it's where the real debate is.