Your model of the brain as multiple neural nets and a voter is a good and useful simplification.
So the 'voter' takes multiple inputs and combines these into a single output?
Only if you have no idea how a neural network works, is it a useful simplification. The 'multiple nets' in the example given by GP mainly describe many input features.
I read some of the (cached) threads on bodybuilding.com he was in, but even in those cesspools of ignorance, he was the crazy one.
Maybe the weirdest thing about those threads is that he also seemed quite socially inept online. Most not-ancient netizens would know that if someone said 'dude, you look like a total phaggot in those vids', the right reply is not 'WHAT?! I look fabulous in this vid. That is a $500 Prada sweater!'. Unless you were trolling, of course.
For many people that are socially really awkward IRL, online social groups are probably the only places where they feel like they can express themselves freely. Imagine not even being able to fit in anywhere online.
Apparently, he did play WoW in a very active guild, so you would imagine that to be a source of social interaction, at least. On the other hand, maybe the guild was very task-focused. I've never played WoW, so I find it hard to say whether it's possible to play an MMO for hours a day with other people and not have any meaningful social interaction.
They cease to exist, but they don't lose their stuff?
I guess that really depends on what the root is for his antipathy towards women/people/mankind.
In this case, I believe his social isolation was the root and getting him out of that with proper training and real-world exercise would have turned him into one of the many quite normal socially slightly challenged people in our society. If, however, some traumatic experience were the cause, then one would expect the result to indeed be a charming and doubly dangerous psychopath.
I think this whole episode yet again underlines that loneliness and social isolation can drive people to do terrible things.
From Mark's Daily Apple:
"As I’ve suggested before, there’s something to the ancestral context – the genetically wired, “expected” conditions that characterized our evolutionary history. Extended isolation meant almost sure death in our ancestors’ days." ( http://www.marksdailyapple.com... )
Have you heard him talk?
This guy pretty much defines 'utterly creepy psycho'. Just watch some of the video's discussed in TFA.
The problem is that I don't believe pattern matching is an effective or intuitive means for specialized or generalized intelligence processing. It's good for simulations of the brain, but a simulation is not going to automagically develop intelligence. There is far too much of a learning and training process involved from birth to death of a human in the development of their intelligence and knowledge, so a generalized intelligence based on pattern matching is going to be implicitly at the mercy of the quality of it's education.
Sure, but let's be honest here: whatever we're going to engineer will have a huge potential to acquire intelligence much faster than we have attained it. I really feel that the notion of human exceptionalism when it comes to intelligence is 99% wishful thinking. We collectively want to believe that we are somehow special and that our level of cognitive processing is somehow practically unattainable for artificial systems, but the reality is that our cognitive capabilities are the result of a longterm process of trial and error. It strikes me as arrogant to hold the position that an informed and highly goal-driven approach towards creating systems with similar capabilities would prove to be in vain.
Looking at the success in and speed with which we have recreated a lot of the other naturally evolved capabilities artificially (cameras, auditory sensing, etc.), I believe that recreating our cognitive capabilities is a matter of decades rather than one of hundreds or even thousands of years.
The multitude of paths that we can and will take to attain said cognitive capabilities will obviously not all lead to the general intelligence you speak of, but I'm convinced that some of them will. And quite soon, on an evolutionary scale.
Most people have known this for some time.
Yeah, the soap and shampoo industry is really suffering.
Yes, and even though I'm speculating here, I'd say that it is also quite likely that the particles would simply be excreted by us and our food. In fact, if that were the case, one would expect the particles to become less prevalent as you move higher up the food chain and even then mostly in the contents of the digestive tract of the animals (which most people avoid eating. I know I do).
I'm not saying that the particles couldn't be dangerous at all, or that dumping plastics into the ocean isn't terrible, just that when it comes to 'small stuff that could be bad for your health' there is a difference between sand, heavy metal ions, asbestos and algae. Alarmist 'plastic is bad, mmkay' isn't going to do us a service.
Related subject matter:
http://www.nature.com/news/201...
nearly 300 million tons of plastic in 2012 [...] reaching 288 million tonnes in 2012
Estimates of how much of that production has been trapped in Arctic ice provided in the article:
- "[some of] much of [the total amount of plastic produced]"
- "more than 1 trillion pieces of plastic"
- "abundances of hundreds of ['fragments less than 5 millimeters long' selected using a microscope] per cubic meter"
Would have really hurt to estimate the weight of those fragments? One plastic bag could easily end up as a million pieces of plastic. About one plastic bag or 10 grams of plastic per 10.000 cubic meters sounds a lot less dramatic, I guess.
Yes, fight fire with idiocy. Good idea.
It's just a different (and interesting way) of computing. We already have a number of different specialized processors. The inevitable NeuralPUs will excel in pattern recognition, classifying, decision making, extracting salient patterns from input, etc.
Like in the cases of other specialized processors, we can already emulate this type of computing (and do so very thankfully in many fields). Having well-designed hardware processors will make this type of computing to be a commodity (as the other specialized processors have done). Currently, our neural processing emulators lose out big time to even the most basic of their dedicated organic counterparts when it comes to performance per watt for certain tasks (the human brain runs in the tens of watts) and performance per volume (a human brain is pretty beefy compared to a consumer CPU, but it's not supercomputer-warehouse big).
The current search is basically for effective artificial hardware neurons, but more so for the (topological) design of the NeuralPUs. Just slapping a shitload of neurons together and feeding it data is very ineffective. The layered approach of deep learning is a very good step up from the flat networks we're used to employ, but the topology is still ridiculously simple when compared to the complex topologies of subnetworks in the mammalian brain. Combine that with the (in comparison to their organic counterparts) very simplistic learning models for artificial neural networks and the only conclusion can be that there is still a long way to go.
But we'll get there. Skynet for president 2032!
The approach I see as most viable is an online service where EULA's (and contracts in general) can be uploaded or constructed and presented to end users in a predictable format.
General advantages:
- Changes could be easily highlighted
- Individual articles could be translated into everyman-speak
- Reuse of individual articles is possible, allowing compilation of a EULA out of existing (annotated) articles
- Links to public information concerning the judicial validity of or court cases surrounding certain articles could be included, as well as comments on the articles
- (Electronic) Signatures could be administrated by this independent party
- etc.
For small businesses, the ease of constructing solid EULAs could be a reason to use such a service and larger corporations could use the service as an indication of benevolence and transparency.
I'm pretty sure end users would love such a service, but I'm less confident that the service providers would like it.
I was going to say 'nice try', but your source-free anecdotes are just too underwhelming.
without the legislation on the curvature of bananas
Nice cherry-picking there. Do you have any idea what the ratio is between sane legislation and inane legislation on the EU-level? Or on the level of the different member states? You seem to be under the impression that such legislation would be absent in the individual member states.
Also, don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Think about the alternative here: every member state would have different regulations on the curvature of bananas, forcing banana sellers to deal with all of those if he wants to sell his products in the EU. The EU is a pain in the ass target market as it is, with all the required localizations, communication languages, wildly varying business cultures and highly differing member state regulations on a multitude of fronts.
the lavish subsidies to farms in France and Poland
If the shit ever hits the fan on a global scale, you will be very thankful that you have at least a chance of food on your plate. If the subsidies vanish, reliance on food sources outside the EU will skyrocket as we simply cannot compete with the low cost food production elsewhere.
Powerful agricultural lobbies have a lot to do with the subsidies, but there is a very clear strategic reason for the subsidies as well.
In short, we were happy with the old EEC
Were you, though? Really? You had no complaints whatsoever about it? Or are you just regurgitating the nonsense that everything was better in the old days?
The EU can be great and we should focus on how to make it perform well, instead of clinging to our familiar arbitrary little islands in it.
I think people overestimate how well their own office situation extrapolates to the entire world.
He who steps on others to reach the top has good balance.
