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 :-).

Be fair. I think Google are just trying to get their shit in everyone's faces so we don't get a repeat of the iPhone situation (possibly even with Apple). What did Apple do? They took ideas that everyone had been working on for decades, put it all together pretty nicely and the marketed the bejesus out of it. Jobs realised that the base tech had finally got to a point (or would by shipping) where it would all work together in useful ways. Being so dominant, he was able to make the process work without the ridiculous infighting at Nokia or silly arrogance of RIM. Then they started suing other companies for their "inventions".

Google just wants everyone, including the lawyers, to know (actually to think) that *they* are the ones doing the inventing, and if anyone's going to be suing, it's them. The tech probably still isn't there but they aren't going to wait around this time, they'll just keep pushing vaporware till it is. Are they actually pilfering stuff left, right and centre? Of course, that's how real innovation works (and f'n Jobs proclaimed loudly!). I'd like to think they won't start suing people for other people's inventions though - time will tell.

This is too long, sorry I can't help myself...

Ok. I'll assume you are an Actually Interested Person and not just a fanboy in disguise. Maybe you can clear up a possible misunderstanding I have with some facts, or at least give a compelling alternative interpretation. I was a fan of Apple until a little after they really took off. Yes, I'm a fan of FOSS, and let's face it, I'm a bit of a Google fanboy. I don't need to hate everyone though, and Microsoft was doing a sterling job of being my pinup demon.

Then I read about about Guru Steve's Mercedes Manoeuvre. While I didn't grow up with rich parents in a privileged area, I did grow up in a highly educated family in the West, and the only thing I wanted for was the most expensive Reebok's or latest gadgets. While I'm not particularly beautiful, I am physically fit and healthy, have white skin, am male and heterosexual. In the grand scheme of things, I've got it pretty damn good - I don't suffer from any discrimination and all the doors are open for me. I believe that all people should be treated equally but I also believe that some people have not had the same cards dealt to them I have. I think that society as a whole benefits when we make the lives of those who haven't had such luck a little easier - the more productive people there are, the better for all, including me personally.

So, many people have heard about Steve's Mercedes manoeuvre - California law allows owners of new vehicles to drive them around without number plates for 6 months. Steve strikes an agreement with a company (a dealership?) to change his new Mercedes every 5 months and 29 days, so in reality he can drive without ever having a number plate. Why would he do this? One reason could be he doesn't want people to know who owns the car. Possible, and I don't know how common it is in California, but I would have thought not having a number plate would draw considerably more attention than having one, and Steve definitely wasn't stupid. Then you look a little and you start seeing pictures around the web of a Mercedes with no number plate in handicapped parking spots. And yes, Steve was regularly seen getting in and out of said Mercedes.

Having worked for several years for a company owned by a non-profit whose sole purpose was to give handicapped (of all sorts) people a chance to get some confidence in the workplace by giving them a job with enough support that they could gain valuable skills, this needed some explaining. Why would he do this? I read that he simply wanted to save time. Ah.... WTF? So Ok, you want to save time. I can accept that. You are a multi-millionaire, and then you are a multi-billionaire, what do you do? You get a driver. Very simple. What does Steve do? He parks in handicapped parking spots. Now this is my interpretation and I don't know how it works in California but my further assumption was that the lack of number plates meant that he would avoid getting parking fines. It might just be so that it's impossible to tow, which would fit nicely with the time thing. Even the possibility that it was to avoid getting fines has meant that Apple has been firmly off my shopping list. Whether it was to avoid the fines or just the towing, I can't find a remotely passable excuse for what he did - I find it completely morally repugnant.

Is this collection of facts incorrect? What about my interpretation? Did he secretly donate millions to handicapped charities? Something else I might be missing?

Hey, thanks heaps for that. The X240 looks pretty much exactly like what I am after, and Lenovo (here in France) seems to let you mix and match upgrades which is seriously cool. What upgrades did you make with your system to get those numbers? Did you up the RAM to 8GB? Do you have an SSD (on top of the cache disk)? What proc do you have? How much extra weight does the larger battery pack add? 12.5" will be noticeably smaller than my current 14" - how do you find the screen?
Thanks!

I tried powertop a few years ago but never had much success, though that was probably v1. I'll give it another try, thanks for the heads up.

A friend dropped the laptop about a year ago (it was an "accident", though he was drunk...). It didn't seem to make a difference for the first 8-9 mths but it weakened the lid/screen joint and with 12 mths of opening/closing has started to degrade seriously. I could spend many hours to try and patch it up but I've never had much success with anything more complicated than building/rebuilding basic desktop machines (stuff with wood is a different story). It's also now 3 yrs old, and with the time spent to fix it and expense in getting a better battery, I was thinking it was better to simply upgrade. With Moore's law supposedly operating, I was expecting to get something considerably better for the same price, or considerably cheaper for the "same" specs. If I am going to fork out top dollar (or rather euros), then I at least want something with great battery life, hence my whinging...

In terms of the OS, abandoning Linux (or even Ubuntu) is not something I'm seriously contemplating. I've worked professionally and personally with Windows and Linux pretty much equally over the last decade. At this stage in my life, my goal is to spend as little time on solving OS and OS-application level problems as possible. Been there, done that and it's not particularly inspiring any more. I have found I spend considerably less time maintaining Linux boxen (laptops, desktops or servers) for the same level of tidiness, security and performance. I want it to "just work", to know how it's "just working" and to spend the least amount of time achieving that. Ubuntu seemed to be the winner on this front for a long while (I've been on 12.04 for the last two years and it's what I've been installing everywhere for the last two years), though the shenanigans with upstart, mir, unity, etc. have made me wary. I'm a big kde fan when a UI is justified - and more importantly it's what I've been using for the last 10 years so I usually get shit done quicker for UI tweaks. I probably pay for that on several fronts - I regularly see various kde components munching cpu... If reasonable, I'll always try and do stuff on the CL or conf files but again, just because it's quicker and that means I know better what's going on.

Mac would mean learning an entirely new (*nix-based but still) system, which would be hard to justify in terms of time. They are also usually top shelf, so it means paying top dollar. I could probably justify the initial time and expense if it meant that in the long run I'd achieve my goal of spending less time for a performant and secure system. Unfortunately, it is going to be a long time before I can disassociate Apple products with Steve Jobs. I worked with handicapped people for several years and Jobs' parking spot manoeuvre may well have taken Apple products off my shopping list for good. Governments don't seem to be punishing companies or people for "doing evil" so I'm reduced to doing it with my wallet... (and yes, I know he's dead... but Apple could have stopped/punished him for being a "bad ambassador" for the brand).

Roaming within Europe is fast becoming free (included in the standard, 20-25€/mth unlimited everything subscriptions) for us here in France, so a Chromebook is becoming a viable option. I have a couple of personal dev servers (hurrah for 10€/mth physical servers!), and never really do proper dev on trains/planes/mountains anyway, so that part is fine - vim over ssh is virtually indistinguishable from local for my usage. The time needed for finding solutions for the 1-2 other desktop apps is now really the only remaining obstacle...

But anyway, if I solved all the problems myself there would be nothing to bitch about on /.! :-).

Tell me when they can make my laptop last for more than an hour without mains and I'll be happy. I need to upgrade but battery life under Linux is so woeful I can't justify spending the ridiculous prices they are asking these days. To get a similar laptop to the 3 yr old one I have (at least in terms of size, weight, memory and disk) I would have to spend the same amount today as back then. Where is Moore's law again? Even though I can't afford one, I was looking at the Dell XPS 13 but for a couple of hundred more (for similar specs) I could get a macbook air and have *double* the battery life with osx. I would even consider it if I could run Linux on it and get similar battery life to osx... But alas, I read it sucks just as much as on all other machines.