And you are a non-American (as in the continents) native speaker of English? I'm from NZ and it's the other way round, or at least was until I left 10 years ago... The "dialect" has undergone very strong Americanisation over the last few decades though. Your "for instance" is also a little ridiculous - a non-American would never say "nine eleven" meaning "the eleventh of September" (or even "eleven nine"). I also can't remember anyone ever saying "September eleventh" but plenty of people saying "September eleven" regarding the attacks on the WTC. The "nine eleven" term has a much stronger relation to the actual date for Americans (US-only?) than it does for non-Americans.

I bought a Moto G because I wanted to test it out before giving it to my brother and upgrading to a "proper" phone, the N5. At this point my brother might be getting my current Moto G but only if I decide to get the 4G version... It does absolutely everything I need and does it well. Damn shame Google sold Motorola - why do they make it so hard for me to give them money?!?

And it's not like *no* police have guns. Like in the few other properly civilised countries on earth, the UK has a police unit that does carry firearms and who are involved if the crime is reported to involve guns or there is suspicion that a suspect is armed with a firearm (for raids, for example). These units are highly trained in when to use, and when not to use, lethal force. It's just a better system. I would rather sacrifice the odd police officer than the countless innocent citizens that are murdered by overzealous cowboy cops.

Yeah, damned Stanford hippies.

"If a lion could speak, we could not understand him". Wittgenstein.

This is precisely why we should give machines a humanoid form and as Turing suggested back in 1950 (as one option), "follow the normal teaching of a child". Something along the lines of what Savage-Rumbaugh & Co. tried with her bonobos (particularly Kanzi). There is obviously a lot of work to do creating the machines that would be able to learn "in a human way" but for me a near-human developmental environment should be a given. Then we'll believe it has consciousness when it asks "what is the meaning of life?" and smiles when you reply "42".

This is where the philosophy/psychology comes into it. Many in the field don't think that humans (or anything else) get born with minds included but rather that they develop (or emerge). Some talk about minds even being "distributed". The idea being that not only is exposure to human culture (language, etc.) necessary but that it is actually constitutive of the minds themselves. Developing this any further would require a lot of space. I can recommend the works of Rodney Brooks and Rolf Pfeiffer if you are interested in robotics-focussed takes on the role of embodiment in intelligence - they definitely convinced me :).

All good stuff but I guess my issue is with the "given near infinite computing power". The real world with real agents in it is super duper complicated. The problem is that by the point where we have adequate knowledge of the body (including the brain of course), physics, chemistry and all the rest and computing power to simulate it all realistically, we'll have been able to create intelligent humanoid robots for a long, long time. Use the world as its own model, as Brooks would say. I argue that while it might be possible to create humanlike intelligence by other means, why not just just create a humanoid robot and socialise it like a child? I have only been reading on the matter seriously for a few months and thought this idea was pretty revolutionary until I read Turing's original 1950 Turing test paper where he finishes by suggesting just that :-). Sure, we're still a while off having robots complex enough to be able to do it properly but I'm pretty close to certain that this will be far and away the cheapest and quickest way to create a humanlike "artificial" mind. Notice I keep stressing the humanlike - if it isn't humanlike then I think there is a good chance we might not know it if we see it. Not that we couldn't create a non humanlike mind, just we wouldn't know we had done it, and we could end up spending vast amounts of money for nothing, or have disastrous results...

I would say the shoe is on the other foot. Show me a single intelligent, adult human without a body and I'll happily remove the "definitely" :-). As far as science has been able to show so far, both brains and bodies are necessary. I think it's certainly possible that a body is only strictly necessary for the developmental phase but that's an empirical question to test. The key problem here is what we call "intelligence". If the definition of intelligence contains only logic processing, then obviously pretty much any modern computer is intelligent. I'm happy with accepting that but would argue that human behaviour (the real kind that we see in the wild, not thought experiments in scholars' heads) is not very well described with this model and needs something else. I'm yet to see any hard evidence that the computational model can describe human behaviour very satisfactorily. Perform chess computations, sure, spend a day taking care of the kids, going to work, playing tennis after work then preparing a romantic dinner, not so sure. At least not so sure it would be done like a human would.

To be honest, I actually subscribe to radical constructivist views of knowledge but will certainly accept that any decent model we use should enable us to predict/explain lots of actually observed phenomena ("hard evidence" you might call it). But let's not forget that for centuries almost all scholars attributed the causes of many phenomena to supernatural deities - it's not because (almost) everyone believes something that it's "the Truth". But I'll grant that maybe I should temper my claim to "it is definitely worth taking the idea that embodiment is necessary far more seriously" :-).

And don't forget we've got two brains. There is also a new current in Cognitive Science rapidly gaining ground - Enactivisim - which rejects the brain-is-everything paradigm common in the Computationalist approaches. Brains are definitely necessary but definitely only part of understanding what goes on with humans, or any other animals for that matter.

WE may well never get there. Because WE will be dead. However, the idea that "science is almost finished" is as old as the hills, and it was as silly back then as it is now. Sure, it may be that humans, or at least Homo Sapiens Sapiens, never leave the solar system - who knows. But it is just ridiculous to suggest that we know everything about manipulating energy and space-time that there is to know or that there is any certainty whatsoever on what we will know tomorrow. Future generations may well be visiting the stars - you know about as much about it anyone else alive today, not much.

I think this is the most important point to note. If we look at the history of our species, it is only phenomenally recently that there has been mass expansion. Homo Sapiens Sapiens 15 thousand years ago was virtually identical to now, and lived mobile in very small groups (with a couple of exceptions). Imperialism didn't exist.

People in the West (and now elsewhere) have come to understand evolution, particularly of our species, in a very biased way. The interpretation is that evolution is directed, or is somehow moving species to "higher" or "more developed" forms. This is not the case. The essence of the theory of Natural Selection simply states that those individuals who are fittest *at the time they are living* will, on average, survive and reproduce more effectively. Nothing about becoming "more advanced" or "moving to perfection". These are cultural add-ons. Conditions favouring one adaptation can change and those organisms can become disadvantaged. Believing the particular set of circumstances that has led to agriculture, cities, pseudo free-market capitalism and imperialism are ineluctable is (scientifically) indefensible. It happened here and it might happen on other planets but there is nothing necessary about it.

There is another problem with the Fermi Paradox - that a species that has developed interstellar travel would be interested in us or our planet. If we look at the state of current biotech, nanotech and AI, it looks utterly certain that humans (obviously not Homo Sapiens Sapiens but what we become) will be able to survive without a biosphere long before we will be able to embark on interstellar travel. The later very probably requires the former anyway. If that situation is common, and there is no reason why it shouldn't be, then interest in colonising, or even visiting, earth would probably be extremely slight. Even without postulating some Prime Directive type practice, why immediately assume alien species will be Borg-like? Or like a benevolent or malevolent father-figure? We can't help but conceive of the question in our own current cultural terms, which is obviously why the "paradox" appears a paradox at all.

I personally think the idea of the "singularity" is a very useful one to consider here. Technology is advancing very quickly at the moment and the way we look at the world is changing very quickly too. If we can't imagine (or predict if you like) what the world will become in less than a century, then why on earth should we believe we know how we will *think* in a century or so? Maybe we'll all be immortal philosophers simply sitting around meditating absorbing energy where we sit. Who knows, but that's the point!

My understanding was also that a healthy human's urine was pretty much sterile. The Russians (and probably others in the Russian East) have a traditional cleansing routine where they drink their own urine too (with a very specific diet while doing it). It is supposed to have stuff in it that once put back in the body, causes the body to start cleansing toxins naturally. I was assured it was a great, "natural" way to get rid of kidney stones, and a lot besides. The problem is that it needs to be drunk neat, and quick before the bacteria start multiplying... Getting it straight back in is ideal :-).

If the evil Beta monster hasn't killed /. then I'll see you back here in 6 years then :-).

I worked with a guy who came to work occasionally with empty frames. I was working (in Ops!) at a marketing agency though... I also have a Chinese friend who used to wear glasses with zero correction to look smarter (that is definitely a widely held belief). The desire to headbutt was strong with me... But ok, one or two examples does not a fashion make.

This has got to be the coolest music video in the world though https://www.youtube.com/watch?....

I'll make a random prediction then - by 2020 smartphones will be a "thing of the past", or at least we'll be in the phase of massive growth of eyewear and decline of smartphones, like dumb vs smart today. It might take till 2024-5 but I seriously doubt it. Huge numbers of people already wear glasses, and the Hipsters (TM) even wear them with empty frames. Immersive AR will blow phones out of the water when we get rich 3D interfaces (Minority Report styles). We'll need to be able to concentrate on text/video for long periods with little/no eye fatigue before we drop phones but I think that'll happen pretty fast, like by 2020.

While this is clearly what most lay-people in the West think, a reasonable number of linguists (the Roy Harris' Integrationists, among others) and historians (particularly of the "Toronto School") think looking at it this way gets us into a whole lot of trouble. Before the printing press there was very little standardisation, particularly for "real" languages. Latin doesn't count for the middle ages because virtually no one actually spoke it day-to-day, so any standardisation came from it being an artificially devised and maintained *code*, rather than "a representation of speech". Before printing most writing had virtually no punctuation and didn't even separate words. Writing was a *memory aid*. Reading was always reading *out loud* - everyone realised that the writing did *not* "correspond to" or "represent" speech as there was so much missing (intonation, stress, pauses, etc.) and could only be used as an aid to help you *remember* what the author *actually* said. The problem is that since then alphabetic literacy (reading and writing, and the offshoots in mathematics) has become so fundamental to all scholarship that it becomes almost impossible to understand the world without using it as a model. It is so deep in our culture that alphabetic literacy has become a moral imperative - it is immoral not to read and write, so anyone who can't can be ignored as morally repugnant, deprived or defective. Those who suggest we try and look at human communication without using alphabetic writing as a model are treated as lunatics, and safely ignored. Writing is now a quite different kind of activity to speech - it is highly standardised and highly political. What's worse, highly literate (so pretty much everyone who has wealth or any sort of power) people have strongly standardised their speech *because* of writing (and other factors, like mobility) - the more educated you get, the more it *seems* your speech is standardised, the more we equate this with "pure" language. That's not how real-time, face-to-face communication works between real people in the real world though.

Why is this important? Quite apart from the virtually invisible but clearly relevant moral issues, there are practical issues for natural language processing and other related fields (like AI). That's what I'm interested in. The rest is just untestable philosophising. If we take the model of language being made up of sounds (phonemes) being grouped into meaningful words (morphemes) and the sentences (clauses), and then try and use computers to decipher *real human interaction* (so trying to interpret natural speech between two humans), then it fails miserably. I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago (AISB50) and an NLP researcher (Roger K. Moore) was complaining that they have plateaued at 75% accuracy, and any small increases (10ths of a percent he was saying) come with large increases in processing power and training corpora. The models haven't changed and it's now looking highly unlikely that even with massive super-computers we'll ever get close to human recognition capacities, at least if we stick with the current model.

I'm hoping to convince someone to let me do a phd to show that we need to change models on Thursday :-).