Liberals asked for it, now they got it. Welcome to Amerika

"Hey may have hit it best, but he was far from first. Poul Anderson's Brain Wave [wikipedia.org], for example, came out in 1953-54. I think there were a lot of even earlier examples, but I don't have them at my fingertips."

Okay, fair. I might have slipped up on my wording.

It's been decades since my old days as a young'un reading all the old Pre/Gold/Silver age stuff. I certainly know who Poul Anderson is, but that exact story is the kind of thing that used to be really tough to find. It's still a little tricky, maybe six web links in Amazon can do it, but back even in the 80's trying to find a then-thirty-year-old story was really tough and I wouldn't have known it even existed to hunt it down.

D. K. and Flowers showed up because it was aggressively highlighted in some school class's curriculum. To be sure, it was worth the exposure, but that's different from trying to make a quick post and hold it to "researcher standards". At 1958 it is reasonably close to the top of the chain and I bet the writers of my examples had at least a phone call advising them "You know you're re-making Flowers for Algernon, right?"

But then there's your note, and if you moved the theme just a little, you might even get some slightly different earlier but not unrelated takes on the theme.

Drifting off topic, but did the infamous Beta in fact get Unicode support?

I mean, look at this tortuous new Beta, did they even bother to put in the Unicode support that people have been screaming for for ten+ years?

Damn we need a mole at Dice. What do they even do at management meetings?

"Let's make a whole new design with 55 changes."
"What about Unicode Support?"
"That's a big word. That's too hard for me. Let's put more videos up instead."

"are mathematics (of which algorythms are a small part) discovered or created ? No one has a clear answer to that question."

I thought it was pretty clear that stuff is discovered. To me this kind of question reads like "Well, does it stop being right at any time once it is discovered?" and the answer is generally no. (A, you sometimes get stuff that was discovered and not properly reported, at which point the original discovery is not at fault and it is just a reporting problem, or B, you get stuff that was *insufficiently* discovered and *over-reported*, causing someone else to re-do parts of the work and end up with something else. But then it's still discovered, at whatever level that year's understanding entails.)

In a way it's a bit silly, you can't just "make up" (create) knowledge, so it has to be there. It can just be ferociously difficult to "correctly" discover, and we might end up with three or thirty versions of the knowledge as we discover it. But once something is really nailed, hard, I can't think of any cases where people said stuff like "Oh, sorry, that law stopped existing in 1932". Every time, when a mistake shows up, it's "Oh, sorry, we didn't discover it right."

See this is where the news gets varying degrees of surreal.

In 2014, you "recycled" a hard drive with important emails on it?! Really?!

So then we're faced with that famous Dr. Who trick of whether the Media is accurately reporting an astoundingly senseless event, or if the Media got it wrong.

Oh look, this time it's the IRS. What's with agencies magically losing data when it suits them? Snark aside and all that, why is it that only HIPAA medical records get taken remotely seriously at least with lip service? What possibly produces a result like "ho hum, let's recycle this person's hard drive and damn any data that happens to be there in the only copy with no backup?!"

I had a mini project looking for other variants of the same idea because Keyes got there first and hit an important theme.

Some other entries:

The Six Million Dollar Man - Burning Bright (1974) William Shatner ... Josh Lang
Phenomenon (1996) - George Malley - John Travolta

And a couple of newer movies that I am out of energy to track down.

Apparently they were fairly awful creatures—flocks of a few million birds blackening the skies, decimating crops and crapping on everything.

Couldn't we direct our sympathies to a more like-able creature? Wooly mammoths or great awks, perhaps?

Because the thought of a few million woolly mammoths blackening the skies, decimating crops and crapping on everything is even more terrifying.

This argument has a bit of a different feel to it though.

Up till now for a decade the agencies just invoke "we're scary and secretive, we don't need to follow your puny little laws because of National Security but we need a billion dollars in next year's budget to build more systems to hold data forever and ever".

And you can bet they cherry pick their data so that they have ten years worth of people's email and Slashdot posts, but suddenly when a lawsuit comes along, suddenly that data vanishes. But then it becomes vital to an investigation! "Oh look, we found it again!"

"...what a lot of people portray as "evil" is really just the absence of a moral code -- more accurately called "amoral". An AI system that has no moral code and no ethical code..."

I think this is the main line of the discussion. Hollywood profit calculations aside, this is what we're worried about. But we don't let people grow up without moral codes, so AI's shouldn't get a free ride.

Forgetting Snowden style confusion, when you commit a criminal act, you expect to get into trouble. So if anything it's a snap to program an AI with all the laws so that it at least knows the basics of what not to do even better than we do. Yes, cue the Grey Areas, but that's a topic we can handle. We're nervous about Skynet/Borg style complete takeovers which have discarded our laws completely.

"The problem with that argument is that we don;t have to design an AI that is self aware by that specific definition."

Without dragging me into Citation Needed stuff, I have read a few things that suggest that self awareness is a crucial part of true AI. (Suggested partial cite - Douglas Hofstadter's book "Strange Loop". )

Partially relevant from another genre is Ray Bradbury's story "The Bicentennial Man". In that story, it is about a robot that grows as an AI. But only near the end with an understanding of mortality do people grant it "true AI" status.

But even before that, just knowing flaws, is what we people have to deal with every day. That's why I have semi-joked that every AI needs an old Pentium 1 chip as part of its processor network, *and to be aware* that it can't fully trust every result it produces. (I know, it's slow, it needs better chips to do the hard stuff.) But to my knowledge that's the only famous chip with a true math error flaw that isn't just past tense "state of the art as it was then".

Asimov had a good start with the three laws of Robotics. We don't let people become random murderers, so why should AI's get a free ride? So we just have to program/teach them basic morality.

True. The NSA, as a government agency, is obliged to follow the rules, in spirit as well as letter. Well said.

Ah, yes, "The ends justify the means". The trouble with that is that the means determine the end. If your means are corrupt, lawless and arbitrary, just what sort of outcome do you expect?

I believe this has been discussed previously: Matthew 7:16, 1 Samuel 24:13, Matthew 12:33, Luke 6:43, James 3:12

" by immaterial (1520413) Alter Relationship on 05:48 AM June 4th, 2014 (#47162803)
A 24 Horus deadline? Just six of those falcon-headed bastards strutting around all godlike and hassling me about missed TPS reports is bad enough, but 24... To be honest, at that point I might just throw myself into the Nile and let my ka move on to the realm of Osiris."

Dear Sir.

Please advise what Creative Commons license you wish for this comment. This is *the* most epic comment I have seen here in months and I would like to do something such as write a short story around it.

Send me an email when you like,

--Tao

Or roughly 100 knot seconds.

Right now, voting for someone named Malcolm Peter Brian Telescope Adrian Umbrella Stand Jasper Wednesday Stoatgobbler John Raw Vegetable Arthur Norman Michael Featherstone SmithNorthgot Edwards Harris MasonFrampton Jones Fruitbat Gilbert 'We'll keep a welcome in the' Williams If I Could Walk That Way Jenkin Tiger-draws Pratt Thompson 'Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head' Darcy Carter Pussycat 'Don't Sleep In The Subway' Barton Mannering Smith could only be an improvement.